2. Summary of Original Project
The original goal of my project was to build an application to manage
information on customers, their car/s, and spending habits. Initially, I wanted the
tracking system needs to be linked to business’s inventory and services so as to
provide the most comprehensive and up to date data. The system would provide
customers with options to meet their desired upgrade needs. And one final
component of the application will focus primarily on service, sending reminder calls
or emails to come in for additional service as is needed specifically by the individual’s
car. While I’m sure all of these things are possible in the future with enough time and
experience, I had to focus primarily on the employee side of my database and
interface. To build a customer user interface for the database would require
safeguards and protective measures to ensure that customers do not access protected
information or accidentally comprise the integrity of the database.
Lessons Learned
In creating my final project, I found the process to be extremely meticulous
since there is such high attention to detail even at the earliest stages. This might just
be the result of my lack of experience, but I felt the vast majority of my time was
spent troubleshooting. While Access does a great job of displaying detailed error
messages to describe a problem, Access does a very poor job, however, of explaining
what these error messages mean. As a result, I had to learn and teach myself a lot
3. through trial and error. If a query I built wasn’t working, I would often reevaluate
exactly what t is I want the query to produce and then think about how best to go
about executing on that idea. Another important thing I learned is how difficult it is
to go back and change things in Access, which is exactly why you need to have a well
thought out plan right from the beginning. Simply adding a column or two to an
existing table is unlikely to cause any problems, but altering or deleting existing data
such as primary keys or lookup values will almost certainly break any relevant queries
or forms you have pertaining to the data.
Content Overview
My final project contains four tables, each with primary keys, foreign keys, and
lookup values for appropriate data. After building these tables, the next thing I
created was update queries. Situations where you have lookup values retrieving data
from other tables or queries lead to the creation of my update queries: one to update
components to upgrades, another to update upgrades to cars, and finally a third to
update cars to customers. Each of the tables also has its own input form, giving me
four forms total. The next thing I built, following that, was queries to answer my
business questions (five queries total). Subsequently, once I successfully built my
queries, I used each one to generate a report giving me a total of 5 reports.
• 4 Tables
• 4 Form (Input)
• 7 Queries
o 5 Business Queries
4. o 3 Update queries
• 5 Reports (Output)
Shortcomings
For me the major shortcoming of my database is the client side interaction.
What I have completed does in fact gather and calculate all of the data I need it to;
however, the database I developed could only be used internally. In the future, I
would want to have customers physically able to check their own personal records and
receive car specific recommendations and service updates. I know it is possible to
achieve this desired outcome because companies like Netflix and eBay do a very good
job of this. They simultaneously collect consumer data and then use that data to
