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Q5-7 How Can Falcon Security Benefit from a Database System?

Q5-7 How Can Falcon Security Benefit from a Database
System?

Falcon Security wants to be able to find videos by querying their characteristics. For example, it
wants responses to questions like “Which videos do we have of the Beresford Building in October
2015, shot from 3,000 feet or less?” And, from time to time, Falcon employees analyze some of
the videos, and they want to record comments about their analyses for potential later use.
Falcon can choose one of two database architectures. For one, it can store the video footage
on a file server and keep metadata about each video in a relational database that it can query. That
metadata will include the address of the video footage on the file server. Alternatively, Falcon can
utilize one of the new NoSQL DBMS products like MongoDB—an open source document-oriented
DBMS—to store the video footage in the same database as the metadata. (See Q5-8).
Toshio Sato investigates these two alternatives and discusses his findings with Cam Forset.
They are both intrigued by the possible use of MongoDB, but they know that their interest is, in
part, a desire to learn something new. They don’t really know how well that product works, nor do
they know how robust the MongoDB query facility will be.
On the other hand, they can readily build a simple Access database to store the metadata. In
the metadata, they can store the URL of the file server location that has the video (for example,
https://abc.Falcon.com/Video1). In this way, they can use Access to store the data and then query it
using the Access graphical query facility. Because Access can also process native SQL, they can use
it for the most sophisticated query operations if needed.
Toshio and Cam discuss these alternatives and decide to use Access to store the metadata.
They know this approach is less risky because it uses known technology. Also, both of them are
skilled at using Access, and they can develop the database and application quickly with less risk.
Toshio and Cam create a short presentation of this recommendation and present it to Mateo, who
approves it.
After the approval, Toshio creates the E-R diagram shown in Figure 5-28 and discusses
it with Cam. She thinks that they might want to add an Employee entity rather than just the
employee’s name in the Analysis entity. They decide, however, that they don’t yet have that
many employees and that adding the extra entity might make the application too hard to use, at
least at present. So with that decision, they proceed to create the database and related applica-
tions. You’ll have an opportunity to do the same with a team of your colleagues in Collaboration
Exercise 5, page 230.

Drone Video Facility
DroneID VideoID FacilityID
Type Date Address
CameraType StartTime Type
AcquisitionDate Length ContractID
TopSpeed Altitude ContactName
Ceiling URL ContactPhone

Analysis
ID
Date
Time
Figure 5-28 Employee
E-R Diagram for Falcon Comments
Security’s Database