SoftWear, Limited (SWL), is a continuing case study that illustrates the knowledge and skills described in each chapter. In this case study, the student acts as a member of the SWL systems development team and performs various tasks.

1. Rick asked you to help him put together a brief progress update for Michael Jeremy and several other top managers. Specifically, Rick wants you to explain the concept of normalization without using a lot of technical jargon. Rick wants you to summarize the concept using plain English and simple examples.
2. At SWL, each employee is assigned to a specific department. Employees from several departments often are assigned to special project teams, however, when a new product is launched or for major marketing events. Carla wants to develop a project management system to track the projects employees assigned, and accumulated project hours. She believes that employees and projects are in a M:N relationship. She showed you an initial design where all data is stored in a single table:
PROJECT DATA (PROJECT-NUMBER, PROJECT-NAME, START-DATE, PROJECT-STATUS, (EMPLOYEE-NUMBER, EMPLOYEE-NAME, JOB-TITLE, DEPT-NUMBER, DEPT-NAME, PROJECT-HOURS)) How would you describe Carla’s design?
3. Carla wants you to create an ERD, including cardinality, for the project management system. She says that you probably will need to add an associative entity.
4. After you create the ERD in the previous step, design a table for each entity, in third normal form.