Business Driven Technology 6th Edition by Paige Baltzan

Exercise 39

Online Classifi ed Ads
With the emergence of the Internet as a worldwide standard for communicating information, The Morrison Post, a medium-size community newspaper in central Colorado, is creating an electronic version of its paper-based classified ads.
Advertisers can place a small ad that lists items that they wish to sell and provide a means (e.g., telephone number and email) by which prospective buyers can contact them.
The nature of a sale via the newspaper's classified system goes as follows:
During the course of the sale, the information flows in different directions at different stages.
First, there is a downstream flow of information (from seller to buyer): the listing in print in the newspaper. (Thus, the classified ad listing is just a way of bringing a buyer and seller together.)
When a potential purchaser's interest has been raised, then that interest must be relayed upstream, usually by telephone or by email.
Finally, a meeting should result that uses face-to-face negotiation to finalize the sale, if the sale can be agreed.
By placing the entire system on the Internet, the upstream and downstream communications are accomplished using a web browser. The sale becomes more of an auction, because many potential buyers, all with equal status, can bid for the same item. So it is fairer for all purchasers and gets a better deal for the seller.
Any user who is trying to buy an item can:
View items for sale.
Bid on an item they wish to purchase.
Any user who is trying to sell an item can:
Place a new item for sale.
Browse a list of the items that he or she is trying to sell, and examine the bids that have been made on each of those items.
Accept a bid on an item that he or she is selling.
Your job is to complete the following:
1. Develop and describe the entity-relationship diagram for the database that will support the listed activities.
2. Use normalization to ensure the correctness of the tables.
3. Create the database using a personal DBMS package.
4. Use Figure AYK.7 as a baseline for your database design.
Data File: AYK33_Data.xlsx
FIGURE AYK.7