Custom Database Development

Development of custom database requires advanced planning that helps ensure database compliance with business needs. The development process involves a number of steps, such as Needs analysis, Scope statement, Conceptual design, and Physical design. Let's explore each of the steps. We also suggest that you use CentriQS customization solution to create and customize your corporate databases.

Carry out a business needs analysis

It is impossible to build house without having laid the foundation. The same way you can't develop a custom database for your company without knowing the business needs. A business needs analysis helps you explore current requirements of your company and figure out how a new database would help in meeting those requirements.

There are three main steps in analyzing business needs, including:

• Understand current state of business. You need to list all factors that characterize and impact current performance of your business.
• Define desired state of business. You need to set expected business performance, set related objectives, and identify factors required to achieve those objectives.
• Highlight existing gaps. You need to identify existing gaps that block achievement of your objectives.

Estimate scope of work

After you have analyzed the business needs and identified the gaps to be filled in, your next stage is to determine the scope of your custom database development project. Your project scope will include a description of all individual jobs and tasks to be done within the project.

Take these steps to estimate the scope of your project:

• Outline possible business improvement models. You can hold meetings with your team to review existing processes and issues and to discuss possible improvement solutions.
• Discuss pros and cons of each model. On the basis of cost-effectiveness analysis and feasibility analysis, you can agree on the most feasible and cost-effective model.
• Define tasks. You need to create a list of individual tasks and assignments and discuss the tasks with your team members.

Develop conceptual design

Now, your team can start the project from making a conceptual design that determines entities and their relationships relating to your business processes. ER diagram (Entity-Relationship diagram) can be used for this purpose.

In this regard, involve your team in doing these steps:

• Identify entities that characterize business activities (e.g. sales, inventory, R&D, HR, etc.)
• Describe each entity by specific properties
• Identify relationships between entities
• Make a model that describes entities, their properties and their interrelationships
• Create ER diagram that visualizes your model

Create physical design

You need to put your conceptual design in practice. In other words, there should be modeled a physical design to describe how your custom database would be best deployed. For this purpose, you can use an object-oriented approach that allows specific database access and structures.

Do the following tasks:

• Develop logical data model. You need to use an object-oriented approach to model relationships between data entities, process steps and database users. Your model should specify key data elements and types of your custom database.
• Develop database structure. You need to define overall structure of your database which consists of tables, records, entities and their properties. When the structure is defined, index all tables to ensure data scalability and availability.
• Create data dictionary. In order to ensure data maintenance and control, you need to create data dictionary which keeps meta-information about database components.

With help of CentriQS Configurator customization solution you can put your database design in practice. In Configurator you can access your database to manage entities, set their properties, create workflows, add tables, create OLAP cubes, etc.