Database

Database Environment Paper:

A Database for an Art Museum

A database is a collection of information that is organized so that it can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. In one view, databases can be classified according to types of content: bibliographic, full-text, numeric, and images. (Techtarget.com) Databases can also be classified by the way in which they organize this kind of information, there are relational databases, distributed databases, and object oriented databases. In this paper I am going to discuss a database designed to store information in an art museum environment. This database will need to track the artwork within the gallery, the artists that created the art work in the museum, and the locations of the art within the museum.

An effective database not only stores all of the data associated with it's function, but does so in a way that it can be accessed fast and that the data can be easily modified. To be useful the database will also need to be able to retrieve lost information, and perhaps check the data for inconsistencies such as duplicates or invalid or null data. If the museum loses any of the data within the database it could have a huge impact on it's operations, so it is important for fail safes or backups to be in place. Without such protection in the event of their systems being hacked, a disaster like flooding, or any other damage to the information system the museum would be in trouble. With this database they will be able to relocate, identify, catalog, etc.. every piece in the case of a problem.

In reality the art museum would be tracking a massive amount of data, things like customer information, art price, art categories, inventory, employee information, etc.. could be stored within it, but for the purpose of this paper it is only going to track information only related to the art. Art related information would consist of things like artist...