Turn-in procedure and late policy reminder

• Assignments must be turned in on paper. On your assignment please include your name and your preferred email address. Also please save a copy of the E/R diagram portion of this assignment, as it will be needed for subsequent project parts.

• On-campus students: Your assignment must be turned in by 5:00 PM on Monday April 10. You may turn the assignment in during class on Monday, or you may turn it in at the course administrator's office: Marianne Siroker, Gates 436. Assignments less than 24 hours late will be penalized 10%. Assignments more than 24 but less than 48 hours late will be penalized 30%. No assignments will be accepted after 5:00 PM on Wednesday April 12.

• SITN students: Your assignment must be timestamped by the courier on Tuesday April 11. Late assignments timestamped by the courier on Wednesday April 12 will be penalized 20%. Assignments timestamped later than April 12 will not be accepted. Assignments not sent by SITN courier are subject to the late policy for on-campus students specified above. No late assignments are permitted for remote SITN students.

• For emergencies: Since emergencies do arise, each student is allocated four "chits". Each chit may be used to turn in a single assignment up to 24 hours late with no penalty, or two chits for up to 48 hours late. For SITN students, two chits are required to turn in an assignment one courier-day late. As with penalized late work, no assignments will be accepted more than 48 hours (or one courier-day) late. We'll keep track of your chits automatically.

The assignment

Your first step is to identify the domain you would like to manage with your database, and to construct an entity-relationship (E/R) diagram for the database. We suggest that you pick an application that you will enjoy working with, since you'll be stuck with it for the whole quarter! In previous years, students who built a database about something they were interested in - a hobby, a favorite Web site, material from another course, a research project, etc. - got the most out of this part of CS145. It is especially nice if you pick an application where you can populate your database using real (as opposed to fabricated) data.

Try to pick an application that is relatively substantial, but not too enormous. For example, your E/R design should have in the range of five or so entity sets, and a similar number of relationship sets. Note that this is a ballpark figure only! You should certainly include different kinds of relationships (e.g., many-one, many-many) and different kinds of data (strings, integers, etc.), but your application need not necessarily require advanced features such as weak entity sets, ""is-a"" relationships, or roles.

To get started on your Personal Database Application (PDA for short), your assignment this week consists of two parts:

1. Write a short (approximately one paragraph) description of the database application you propose to work with throughout the course. Your description should be brief and relatively informal. If there are any unique or particularly difficult aspects of your proposed application, please point them out. Your description will be graded on suitability and conciseness.

2. Specify an E/R diagram for your proposed database. Don't forget to underline key attributes for entity sets and include arrowheads indicating the multiplicity of relationship sets. If there are weak entity sets or "is-a" relationships, make sure to notate them appropriately.

If you're having trouble thinking of an application, or if you're unsure whether your proposed application is appropriate, please feel free to consult with one of the course staff. In fact, we encourage all students to visit office hours to consult with a staff member on your chosen application and E/R design. Coming up with a good design now will pay off greatly as the project progresses.

SAVE A COPY OF YOUR E/R DIAGRAM - YOU WILL NEED IT FOR SUBSEQUENT PROJECT PARTS.