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Question 1
Brindle Hire rents tools to customers and records customers, individual tools and loans in separate tables in a relational database. Employees at several branches use the database to issue tools and manage returns.
Outline how a foreign key can maintain data integrity when a loan is recorded.
[2]
State two benefits of using an established database system that has an active support community.
[2]
Issuing a tool requires both creating a loan record and changing the tool's status from available to on loan. Describe how reliable transaction processing handles a failure between these two changes.
[3]
Brindle Hire plans to rent many new categories of equipment. Each category may require different technical fields, and these requirements are expected to change frequently. Evaluate the suitability of retaining a relational database for the expanded service.
[5]
Question 2
Fenmere Ecology coordinates wildlife surveys using a relational database containing observer, survey and report tables. Each observer may submit reports for several surveys, and each survey may receive reports from several observers.
An observer may submit only one report for a particular survey. Explain why ObserverID and SurveyID together are a suitable composite primary key for the report table.
[2]
State two benefits of storing each observer's contact details only in the observer table rather than copying them into every report.
[2]
The survey table stores SurveyID and SurveyTitle. The report table stores SurveyID and ObserverID, and the observer table stores ObserverID and EmailAddress. Describe how the database can retrieve the email addresses of observers who submitted a report for a survey with a specified SurveyID. Do not write SQL.
[3]
Fenmere Ecology wants to extend the database into an archive containing photographs, audio recordings and free-form field notes linked to surveys. Researchers need to search the content of these files, not just their filenames. Evaluate the suitability of a relational database for this archive.
[5]
Question 3
Aster Mealshare coordinates meal deliveries from several kitchens. Each kitchen currently keeps its own files containing recipient contact details, meal requests and delivery assignments; the charity is considering replacing these files with a shared relational database.
Delivery volunteers should be able to view delivery addresses but should not be able to change recipients' contact details. Outline how database security features can support this requirement.
[2]
State two limitations of relational databases.
[2]
Two kitchen coordinators simultaneously attempt to allocate the final available portion of a meal to different requests. Describe how concurrency control can prevent both allocations from succeeding.
[3]
Recipients often use more than one kitchen, and changes to their contact details are not always copied to every kitchen's files. The charity expects steady growth, but has only one part-time database developer. Evaluate replacing the separate files with a shared relational database.
[5]
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