Database Design Life Cycle

Requirements Analysis

The end state of this database is that the supervisor and forensic examiners of the digital forensics unit will be able to access both historical and current data on the forensics examinations processed thought the forensics lab. Statistical data will be available as it relates to the types of crimes that require digital forensic examinations, if there are cases that involve repeat offenders and the success rate of closed cases.
Design
Conceptual At the conceptual level of the database design the necessary entities will be defined. A root entity and the child entities will be defined. For this database the Digital Forensics Unit will be the root entity and will have three child entities for Investigator, Suspect and Forensic Examiner. Each entity will have a relationship to the other two.
Logical

At the logical level the information that will be contained within the entities and what attributes they will have will be defined as well as which keys will be used as primary key and foreign keys. With this information I will then develop the relationships between the entities. The Investigator Entity will contain have the following attributes; Assigned Case Number, Investigator Last Name, Investigator Employee Number, Case Title (Charged Offense), Date Exam Requested and Number of Devices Submitted for Examination. The Suspect Entity have the following attributes; Assigned Case Number, Suspect Last Name, Suspect First Name, Suspect Date of Birth, Case Title (Charged Offense) and Case Disposition. The Forensic Examiner entity will have the following attributes; Assigned Case Number, Date Case Assigned, Date Case Completed and Number of Devices Examined. The primary key and the foreign key will be the Assigned Case number for all entities.
Physical
At the physical level the tables will start to take shape as the entities are formed into tables. The columns of the tables will be defined by the attributes previously determined. Foreign keys will show the relationships between the entities. During this phase of developing my data base I will start to build the tables that will make up the entities noted above and develop the relationships between the tables using the foreign key, for this database that will be the Assigned Case Number.

Implementation At this phase of the design process a working model will be created from the entities developed during the design phase. At this phase I will build a working model of the case management database on a single workstation.
Data Loading During the Data Loading phase sample data will be loaded into the database model. Data for this database