When I went shopping this weekend with my sister, I didn’t expect to run into a situation that related to my digital humanities studies. After trying on a dress that was too small, I asked the woman in the store if they had the next size up that I could try. Instead of searching through hundreds of racks to find one particular item of clothing, all she had to do was walk over to the computer, scan the barcode on the dress, and up popped a screen that looked much like image here:
The woman located the item on a database and from there, was able to tell me that the store was currently out of stock in that particular size, but it was available to purchase at a few other specific malls close by. When I asked her how much longer the dress was in the larger size, she was able to expand on the item’s details and tell me that exact information.
This store, like many department stores, uses a database to track all the items in its inventory. The rows list individual articles of clothing differentiated by an item number, while the columns contain data about the elements of an article of clothing, such as its manufacturer, its department category, its product sub-category, its size, and its availability. Using a fixed vocabulary for this data, it is easy to keep track of the same types of products without them being separated from each other. I believe this serves as an example of the Relational Model database design, where the different data points can relate to each other in interaction, and entire data sets would not be deleted if other items were. The independence of one item from another is established by the primary key, “a unique value associated with each individual record in a table” according to Ramsay. In the store’s database, the Item # serves as the primary key. When the bar code is scanned on a particular item of clothing, the system reads the code and connects it to the product listed in the database by connecting to its primary key.
After seeing the use of databases in the clothing store, I noticed other instances used throughout my day. Ordering at a fast food restaurant, scanning my Bruin Card to use the dining hall, my iTunes library, and internship search engines are just a few of the many databases I encounter on a day to day basis.
http://www.csharpkey.com/visualcsharp/adonet/forms/deptstore2j.gif