This week, the IT team at Game Technology is working on database design and codes. Your job

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Question:

This week, the IT team at Game Technology is working on database design and codes. Your job is to develop a recommendation for keeping track of individual games and their authors. You will be expected to create an ERD and table designs. Here is what you know so far:

• Every game has a product ID, name, version number, category code, and category description.

• Every author has an author ID, name, mailing address, and e-mail address.

• An individual author can develop one or more games.

• A game also can be developed by several authors. In this case, each author receives a specific percentage of the royalty that the game earns.

This information must be stored in the database. Your plan is to develop an overall design, list all the individual data items, and then include them as fields in the tables you create. Your design must be in the form of an ERD that shows all the entities, including any associative entities, and their relationships. Also, all table designs must be in third normal form (3NF). The IT team also discussed data codes. You read somewhere that six-letter codes can have over 300 million unique combinations, but you don’t know the exact number. Your friend, a math major, said that you could figure out the answer on your own, and she gave you a hint by saying it was 26 to the sixth power.

Practice Tasks and Answers

Task 1. Draw an ERD showing all entities and their relationships, and create table designs that include all necessary fields.

The ERD shown above joins the AUTHOR and GAME tables with an associative entity, called AUTHORS and GAMES. As shown, one and only one author can create many games, or none. On the other hand, one and only one game can be created by at least one, or many authors

Task 2. Calculate the exact number of unique combinations that are possible using a six-letter code.

A one-letter code has 26 possible values. A two-letter code has 26 x 26, or 676 possible values. A three-letter code has 26 x 26 x 26, or 17,576 values – and so on. As the following table shows, a six-letter code would have 308,915,776 possible values.