The document outlines a project for designing a renewed database structure for Airconnect, a low-cost airline, emphasizing the gathering and analysis of requirements, key entities, and relationships. It includes specifics on mandatory features related to customers, flights, airports, routing, security measures, and testing methodologies, as well as best practices throughout the system development life cycle. Additionally, it discusses the implementation using Oracle 11g and the significance of data modeling approaches such as ORM.

1. IBM Technical Contest
National Level Database Designing
Narendran Thangarajan,
@naren_live
SSN College of Engineering, Chennai.

2. The Problem Statement
• Consider an Airline Company, AIRCONNECT.
• It was launched as a Low-Cost carrier in 2005. Now
it is emerging as one of the market leaders.
• Need for a renewed database structure.

3. 1. Gathering Requirements
• Collection of details about existing airline reservation
systems.
• Experiencing the usage of the different sales
channels available.
• Planning the non-functional requirements to
enhance performance, reliability and robustness.

4. 2. Requirements Analysis
• Analysis of the collected information to extract the required
details, constraints, necessities etc.
• Identification of entities.
– Categorization
– Noun Phrase method
• Deduction of relationships among the entities in terms of
Functional Dependencies.
• Generation of new entities (based on relationships).
• Identification of attributes from the requirements.

5. Conceptual Schema

6. Mandatory Features
All details related to Customers - PASSENGER, TRAVEL_AGENT
Customer Details – Derived :
Further specializes to Passenger
and Travel Agent
Person – Base Entity : Has all the
details like Name, Address, etc.

7. Mandatory Features
All details related to Flight - FLIGHT,FLIGHT_LEG, LEG_INSTANCE
A Flight is a travel from
origin to destination
The Flight_legs for every day are
instances of the same Flight_leg entity
Each Flight has one or more
Flight_legs, depending upon
number of intermediate stops

8. Mandatory Features
• Details about Airplane : AIRCRAFT_TYPE, AIRPLANE,
LEG_INSTANCE
Aircraft Types are the different varieties of
Each Leg Instance is
airplanes like AirBus, Boeing
assigned an Airplane
Airplane includes all the
individual Flights. Each Flight is
of a particular Aircraft Type

9. Mandatory Features
Airports – AIRPORT
Each Flight Leg must have an
airport as the origin and
destination.
Airport entity holds the details
about each airport, including
its geodetic details

10. Mandatory Features
• Origins and Destination – ROUTE
Route consists of all the
routes possible as defined
by IATA.
Each Flight Leg has a cost associated with it.

12. Systematically convert the EER model
to a relational schema
• First make a flat conversion of attributes  fields.
• Propagate keys based on participation constraints.
• Normalization.

13. Relational Schema

14. Database Design
• Choice of ORM – Why not RM.
• Better support for composition of services.
• ER vs EER :
– Extensibility
– Need for Aggregation
• OOM based ORDBMS – Oracle 11g R2

15. Efficiency
• Selection of Data model – ORDMS.
• Creation of correct indices.
– Spatial Indices
– Organizational Indices (for nested relations)
• Indexing specific fields to enable faster JOINs.

16. Innovation
• Automated distance/fare calculation using Spatial
Features.
• Promoting Flight Services using Data Mining.
• Find airports in proximity during emergency
situations.
• Using Ad-hoc queries to generate Demographic
details.

17. Security
• Access Control with tuple-level and field-level granularity.
• Role Based Access Control
– Separate set of privileges for Passenger, Travel Agent and
Moderator
• Sensitive Data are encrypted using SHA-1 hashing
algorithm.
• Monitoring DBA and restricting privilege escalation.

18. Presence of Bugs in SQL
• Extensively tested my system and ensured it satisfies all the
considered requirements.
• Tested using the tool QUEST CODE TESTER FOR ORACLE

19. Extendibility
• Class – Sub Class relationship.
• Hierarchical structure enables addition of
extra features.
• Relations are properly normalized.

20. Best Practices
• Adapted SDLC for arriving at the design.
• Requirements Analysis – 5 rounds of discussion with the
users and travel agents.
• Visited websites to understand the existing Internet
Booking implementations.
• Booked a Ticket in SpiceJet using TeleBooking to
understand the Telebooking system.
• Documentation of every SDLC stage.

21. References
1. Fundamentals of DATABASE SYSTEMS, Fifth Edition -Ramez
Elmasri, Shamkant B. Navathe
2. An Introduction to Database Systems - C. J. Date
3. Maruthi Air Links Pvt. Ltd – Chennai.
4. Amadeus Global Reservation System
5. www.spicejet.com
6. www.flykingfisher.com

22. SDLC stages in this project :
1. Requirements Gathering - Users, Travel Agents.
2. Requirements Specification Document.
3. Requirements Analysis – Documented
4. Conceptual Design : EER Model.
5. EER to Schema Mapping.
6. Implementation using Oracle 11g.
7. Testing using Quest Code Tester.