Ivey School of Business: The Doctoral Tracking Database

Richard Ivey School of Business has a need for the creation of a database, to be used for managing information about students and their courses of study, in its Business PhD program. Information on students to date has been maintained in a mix of paper and computer-file systems. The program director would like to develop a database, using a facility such as Microsoft Access, to be used for this purpose. The case provides examples of the actual forms and data maintained currently, and challenges the students to first create an entity-relationship data model, then a design for a relational database.