A Database Design comes Alive with an Embedded Message Center

By thinking of business data transactions as messages you open your mind to new database design possibilities that can help you articulate more effective business models. The metaphor becomes a reality when you begin to actually incorporated the idea into the software.

A Message Center can essentially be embedded into a database design by identifying the steps of the Communication Process and assigning structure to the process as: (1) a table where the message idea or concept is stored, (2) a table that records the sender’s transmitted message, (3) a table that records where a message is sent and (4) a table that records and thereby verifies that the message is received.

Each of these four tables are of course associated with additional fields that round out the natural construction of a record layout whose purpose is noticeable at the visible interface level and tied together with a scripting language suited to you or the developers you have contracted to do the work.

The key point here is that these four tables will serve as your business activity message center and will include customers, vendors and employees related to your particular service or product. All of the traditional tables representing sales, inventory, finance, etc will be included in the design but now are associated with a virtual message center that is open for you to innovate in any number of ways.

Your new message center lets employees gain an important psychological stake in their efforts at various points throughout the company. You may experience increased profits just because you were sure to include design ideas connecting your customers, vendors and employees in a dynamic communicative process.

Ideas for employee involvement could be something as simple as personalized customized reporting showing daily contributions to the offered service or product at each stage of eventual delivery. This could only be accomplished with a pre-thought out plan made real by your embedded message center.

Your vision and effort combined with a business savvy will of course contribute the most to the design of your new database. This will in turn spur improvements in profits and add energy to a work environment that will foster employee enthusiasm because people feel better when their ideas are incorporated into the daily activity.

Strive for Virtual Centricity in Your Business Database Designs

Virtual centricity is a concept that places business data at the center of your database design efforts and forces your application requirements into the role of becoming the embedded reality of your operational software.

This is accomplished by setting up an articulate plan that allows for scripting of database mappings between XML tags and function pointers to the relevant Read-Write routines found in the XML code that acts as a glue holding the syntax in a pattern suited for business semantics.

An XML-based architecture fits into a real-time operating system as the embedded requirements of a business application.

The real-time operating system provides the business application with low-level services such as memory allocation, network services (TCP/IP), and semaphores.

The business application software provides the system with its unique value, the device's "reason for being." In the business code, there is assumed to be an autoresponder agent-either developed in-house or purchased commercially. In addition, there is a set of management information objects which access the device data for management via the autoresponder.

The XML embedded software consists of a series of wrapper routines (scripted tagged-access methods) for the requirements data found in the business software.

Lastly, since there are as many different ways of representing data as there are individual developers and designers, a viable Web-based management solution needs the data access written in a special format that it can understand. This special format is an agile business-centric perspective referred to as virtual centricity.

Some common characteristics regarding the virtual centricity include the following factors that must be written into the syntax of the software and tightly mapped into a pattern of named-tags associated with the XML tree structure and corresponding database.

1. Recognition of the facts that data flows in from one or more sources while some data is static and stored, but other data is dynamic and accessed in different ways.

2. Data needs to be ordered and structured while at the same time needs to be handled dynamically as it is filtered from one system to another

3. These dynamic requirements of data must be integrated and shared across multiple tables or applications (or both) and concurrently may need to be stored in different storage media internal and external to the operational platform.

4. Provide a tracking sub-system to monitor the amount of data to be managed as it grows in both size and complexity.

5. Consider the facts that data can be large while the devices operating on that data can have limited system resources (usually for cost reasons).

Once all of these considerations are carefully addressed and embedded semantically into the design syntax, your business objectives should be fully realized.

The Database Design Process is Crucial for Business Survival

Database design includes the power to capture business requirements and cost-saving characteristics useful in a large variety of industries and specialty fields within and across industries. This idea alone is enough to consider the possibility that this process is central to capturing the essence of a profitable activity.

For example, these times of reduced IT budgets begs for new and innovative approaches to quality management, strategic procurement, cost management, new product engineering, production, planning inventory management, just-in-time-supply-line management and on and on for many growing technical necessities that propel a business into a profitable position.

This topic of database design is so crucial to the survival of a business today that even if no employee in your company has the skills or knowledge to provide the customization your business needs, you must look outside for a skilled systems designer to fulfill the requirement.

Your newly customized design and all of its accompanying software procedures is what provides you with the cost saving means along with the ability to produce new services and products.

One important first step is collecting your business requirements into some kind of planning document so that you can provide yourself with a very clear business view. This same document can be used by a systems application analyst to generate a sample population of data instances that can provide a significant representation of the kinds of data your database will need to work with to articulate a model of your business.

A sample population is helpful for checking or determining the features that will become a part of your successful information processing system. From this comes the logical model to give the designer a description of the structures within the application domain. This description includes a series of relational tables that match key features and contribute directly to the conceptual model that satisfies both the database design and the business requirements.

The closer that the designer and business owner
reach the better will be the outcome of well-structured DBMS. This of course refers to the relationship of data to the factual business needs. There is still a software control-system and interface-system to consider.

The interface-system provides all of the input and output features necessary to create, modify and delete account-records along with the need to query and report on all the transactions that are applied on a regular basis.

The software control-system ties all the component features into a smooth flow of operation and provides access to future functional and structural growth through the addition of software extensions.

Although a database has become a very common concept with internet users and business owners, few people have a comprehensive idea about its complexity and its interwoven contribution to successful business procedures. But hopefully, this brief article shows that business-data and technical-data mutually combined in the early stages of a database design project is what determines success.