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Storing Hierarchical Data – An Early Solution
Have you ever faced a situation of handling hierarchical data, where retrieving them according to the tree structure is important? This article finds a way of storing data that could be retrieved faster.
Sample of Great Jobs on the Job Boards
| Database Administrator San Diego, CA Great American Insurance Co. |
Application Developer Ottawa IBM |
Departmental Databases – How Do You Work with Them? (Email Your Thoughts)
David wrote from the University perspective: "Definitely an issue for us as our graduate school at the University […] is fairly de-centralized. The departments that comprise our school have nearly always done student & faculty data tracking themselves. In the past years though, the central Dean’s office of the school (which I work for) has developed a central faculty database which is mostly used by our departments – and its become quite a powerful tool for everyone.
For us now its at the point of we need to let the departmental people know what we have, what it can do, and how to use it for dealing with their faculty. We can’t stop them from re-inventing the wheel but its often been that they just don’t know what we’re doing – history of de-centralized and lack of communication.
Most of the student data is still tracked within each department as it seems each time we attempt to bring everyone together we hear that each department has such "different’ needs that one system can’t satisfy them. So we punt."
A different David writes: "In January of 2006, we conducted a study of one Division in our business.
We found 2717 Microsoft Access databases (.mde) taking up 45,617,309 KB of space.
Some of these databases were kept in MS-Access because of the extreme sensitivity of the data. They were on non-networked computers that were stored in closet-like rooms with security on the doors.
Many were for convenience, such as phone number lists, address lists, budget preparation, staff vacation days and attempts to organize and track workload, projects, etc.
Most were re-working of database data, in order to create reports. These are the most worrisome, because there is no way of knowing where the data came from or how it was changed from the original source.
Many were for department or section information, such as filed grievances, staff discipline, user complaints or incident tracking.
Some had data that is of real value to the whole organization, but the Division lacked money to build a robust database application for it. So they kept it in MS-Access, unknown to most everyone else in the organization."
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