Chapter Four Questions and Answers

Chapter 4

1. What are some of the difficulties in managing data?
In relation to managing data, many difficulties can arise. These include difficulties such as data is constantly added and saved and the amount of data that needs to be managed expands. Individuals use numerous methods and devices in which to store this data as it (data) is scattered throughout the organisation. As much of the new data is unstructured, their content cannot be truly represented in a computer record making it difficult to manage. As companies grow and change frequently; it can be challenge to ensure new employees do not jeopardize data. Also, over time data decays e.g. customers move to new addresses. Legal requirement also make data management difficult. As these laws are different within each company; data security and integrity can be easily jeopardised.

2. What are the various sources for data?
The various sources of data include Internal Data, External Data and Personal Data.

3. What is a primary key and a secondary key?
A primary key is the identifier field or attribute that uniquely identifies a record. A secondary key is whereby the identifier field or attribute has some kind of identifying information, but typically does not identify the file with complete accuracy.

4. What is an entity and a relationship?
An entity involves a person, thing, place or event where information is maintained in a record. It is the number of entities in which make up a relationship and the degree of the relationship. The main types of relationships include binary, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many.

5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of relational databases?
Relational databases are usually designed with a number of related tables; where each of these tables contains records (listed in row) and attributes (listed in columns). An advantage of relational databases include allowing users great flexibility in the variety of queries they can make; a disadvantage to this though as large scale databases can be composed of many interrelated tables, the overall design can be complex creating slow access times.

6. What is knowledge management?
Knowledge management is a useful concept whereby it aids organizations in an attempt to manipulate important information that is part of the organisation’s memory. This is normally in an unstructured format. For a particular organisation to be successful in relation to capital, knowledge must exist in an exchangeable format.

7. What is the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge?
Tacit knowledge involves ‘the cumulative store of subjective or experiential learning; highly personal and hard to formalize knowledge’. This is comparably different to explicit knowledge which is objective rather than subjective, and is also rational with technical types of knowledge.