CSC 490 - Assignment Three - DUE April 25th

Part 1. Consider the following set of tables:

Use appropriate text resources or relevant online tutorials to do the following:

1) Create tables in a database system of your choice and populate them with the information given.

2) Provide appropriate links between the relevant attributes (keys) in the tables.

3) Produce a report that contains the following information: Last Name, Projectid and ProjectName.

4) Email (or print) the database tables and the report to me.

PLEASE NOTE: WHAT YOU HAVE ABOVE MIGHT BE "DIRTY DATA"! YOU MIGHT HAVE TO MODIFY THE TABLES (OR DATA REPRESENTATION) TO PRODUCE THE REPORT!

PART 2

Lowe's is a major retail chain specializing in the sale of construction and home repair and maintenance products (among other things). The company has 2,133 retail stores in North America with total sales of $68.7B in 2018. Lowe's carries more than 40,000 products in stores and employs 310,000 people worldwide.

Suppose you are a buyer for the refrigerator product line at Lowe's. You work with nine different brands and numerous models within each brand. One of your goals is to turn your inventory as many times a year as you can. In order to do so, you want to identify poorly selling models (and even brands) as quickly as you can since competition in retail is intense.

Another problem is that while some sales trends are national, others pertain to specific regions. A strong seller in the Southeast may not sell as well as in the Northwest. Thus, a brand may be a big seller in one region and not in another.

In answering the following questions, assume that you have total sales data for each brand and model, for each store, for each month. Also assume that you know the store's city and state.

1) How could regression analysis help you determine poorly selling brands? (For a discussion of regression, see "Head First Data Analysis")

2) Do you believe that there is an application for a Decision Support System for Lowe's? Why or why not?

3) Do you believe that there is an application for a Knowledge Management System for Lowe's? Why or why not?

PART 3

Read the first three chapters of Tsvetovat and  Kouznetsov (Social Network Analysis for Startups) and answer the following:

1) What is meant by "the power of informal networks"?

2) What is a graph, and how does it relate to network analysis?

3) What is "centrality" in network analysis and why is it important?

4) What are "small world networks"?