Lecture Post- Databases

The MetroCard Finder App is designed to help people find their lost/stolen Metro Cards by scan/enter the code on the back of the metrocard into the computer or phone via the MTA website and/or with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), a tracking device) chip on the back of the card. 

             The lecture on Database materials applies to everything, including my entrepreneurship idea. It applies to everything because information is involved and needed in every situation. Data is just words until someone makes information out of it, and manages it. A database is a system that is designed to manage large amounts of data and information quickly and efficiently, while making specific information easy to access. Data can be anything; it can be name, height, weight, address. The list goes on. Databases are software applications that consist of many tables that are used to store information. 

            Databases are a great way to manage and store information; they are used to avoid the mistakes that information management systems in the past made. Unlike physical files, text files, and excel, with databases it is almost impossible for your information to get misfiled, it is less difficult to search and store information, and there is no redundancy of data. The redundancy of data is prevented with the use of primary keys which are used to give each piece of information/ category, a signifier that sets it apart. A great example of this is Autoincrimated numbers for each piece. 

             A huge database will be needed for my entrepreneurship idea for many reasons. Almost everyone in NYC uses public transportation regardless of whether or not they have cars, even the tourists who come to visit use it. A database will help us keep records of purchase transactions, reported lost/stolen times, when cards are deactivated, the personal information of customers(addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card information), Card numbers, RFID chip identification, etc. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) would be most useful because it would describe the relationship between the different pieces of information. For example, to which customer does all this data belong to? Foreign Keys would help in this process because they establish a technical relationship between two or more tables; in our case the tables of information would be Customer Id, Card Number, Reported Missing Times, and RFID chips.