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Data Base Management Systeman Introduction and history

Our study case: Hotel Bincker's

In the last few years Hotel Bincker's has grown from a small village hostel into amedium sized business hotel in a rapidly growing small silicon village town. And

the desk has no time to keep track of all information needed to take care of its

guests in a proper way. "We are a hotel not an airline!" is vaguely muttered by

the manager after he lost your name again, did not cross off the room on his

blackboard and booked the same room twice.

But after management communicated its concern with losing clients, the manager

promises to clean up his act.

Some weeks later when you show up at Hotel Bincker's desk the manager will

finger through his agenda which is ordered by date and he will find your

reservation. This method works well for a small hotel. Guests are coming back

and the hotel's business is profitable again.

H otel Bincker''s agenda and room reservation "database"

But after some years, Hotel Bincker's has grown again. Now it is a larger hotel

with some 100 rooms and the manager is still using an agenda for each floor, and

then history repeats: your name is lost. The manager needs many minutes to find

what room is available. It is obvious that any (paper) agenda would be too small

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alphabetically, so you can quickly find what you are looking for. These examples are

already a small database, see? But remember a database can have any physical

form: paper, on a blackboard, an electronic file, or even some tally sticks . (a very early

form of some kind of registration in 1310)

tally sticks

The lists we have here can be put on a computer in a word processor document orsome tabular sheet like a spreadsheet. These are called files. It is possible to

combine those two in any way, already a sort of database. The difference between

a database and a file is that there is something extra to it. A database must

contain a method, amongst other things, to look up something. Comparable to

the databases used by search engines like Google, Alta Vista, or Yahoo that we

use to find companies which could sell us a reservation system. The Internet is

also some kind of database. And all this information is managed by a database

management system, hence DBMS.

Case study: Hotel Bincker

³Our biggest problem is to find rooms that are vacant and the ones that are

occupied,´ says Lisa. Below I have drawn an example listing for vacancies that

can be called with one click of a button:

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Here is part of the rooms list with guests who reserved a room for the 20th of

December

Here is part of the rooms list with guests who reserved a room for the 20th of

December

Name First Address Notes Phone Gender Pet Vegetarian Smoker

Dijkstra Jan 14

Pinkerton

lane

Deloit,

1234DE

Delaware

USA

Yes 31 44

345

3666

M Y N

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Whe

n

our

desk

man

ager

want

s to

have a quick view when a room becomes available, or for that matter occupied

rooms, he calls up his agenda in the form of a chart:

This chart is color coded, blue is a guest, green is available, purple are

reservations, yellow is a national holiday or other special day; mostly meaning

prices go up. When our front desk manager wants more specifics he can open a

sub window to search for a room (in all pos sible combinations: adjacent rooms,

Romero Paolo Plz de 5

Mayo 123

4325-23

Roma

Italy

No 123

4523

3509

M Pietro N N

Rubnes Jetro 123 Pole23

Deliver to

mailoffice

San

Remaro

Trinidad

Yes 1014403

2226

M Vlato N N

Voloute Maria 12 rue de

la liberte

Auxerre

120394

France

No 404

2396

2350

F N Y

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smoke free, etc.)

Or use the more advanced form of a floor plan:

Our front desk manager will have an instant overview of all available rooms and

their configuration.

³That,´ concludes Lisa, ³is all we need.´ Not a complicated system like the Hilton

has, but one that offers you the information you need with one click of a button.

And one where we can put in the information we have on our guests habits and

likes or dislikes.

³So,´ asks her dad, ³how would we go ahead? What do we need? A scientist? It

must be a system that we can maintain by ourselves with no need for expensive

consultants with little knowledge of our business.´

And Lisa answers: ³You know, dad; we just happen to have an assignment in our

class that just covers your need.´

Instantly a broad grin plays on Dad¶s lips. ³OK,´ he says, ³let's see if we can be of

mutual benefit to each other.´

So now you have some idea of how most automation projects start: from a

certain need and/or a fear of losing business.

Continue to the next chapter where I will introduce some methods and techniques

used to analyze information.