Case Study: Amazon.com
Seattle-based Amazon.com offers millions of in-print and out-of-print books
on its Web site. It is also a top online music and video retailer. The company
offers perks, such as free e-mail notification of new books,
recommendations for specified genres or subjects, and book reviews. Its site
also offers free electronic greeting cards and online auctions for a variety of
products. The owner of the company is interested in improving their
database system.
Every book can be identified either by its unique ISBN number or by the
combination of author name and book title. The majority of the books
available on our website are still in print but many of the books we offer
online are out-of-print books. For this reason, we need to keep track of
whether a book is still in print as well as its publishing house information (so
that we can order it if it’s not in stock). We don’t have a simple way to
distinguish the publishing houses but we need to keep track of their full
address.
Once a book goes out of print, we need to indicate that it’s status has
changed. The customer can then search the out-of-print books to see if it is
available. For out-of-print books we work with a network of local suppliers.
Once again, we don’t have an easy way to identify the suppliers and we need
to keep their full mailing address.
We also use keywords to identify the books on our website. They describe
the type of book and can be used by customers to look up books they may
have an interest in. Some of our keywords are: mystery, fiction, fables,
detectives, sports, history, America, Europe, language, and computers. We
make a listing of every book that has been associated with a keyword (by
ISBN number). This way listings of books by keywords can be produced for
customers who are looking for books but don’t have a specific author or title
in mind.
As for our customers, we allow the people who surf our website to
search for books and listings of books by title or keyword or author
or ISBN number.