Question

Assignment 2: Operating and Database Systems

Imagine that you have been selected as the consultant to design a new computer system for an investment company.

Help with five to seven pages in which you:

Discuss the considerations for implementing an operating and database system. Recommend the optimum system, considering the types of revenue and expense transactions for this company.

Assess the issues related to data management, key elements of the database environment, controlling and auditing data management, and the related risk to an organization. Discuss possible strategies to mitigate those risks of installing a database without adequate controls.

Analyze the six (6) broad classes of control activities defined by Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) and determine how they will impact the database design.

Recommend the appropriate database structure for the types of transactions that will be entered and whether the computer operations would be more effective if they were centralized or decentralized.

Answer 1

While designing the database systems and the structure of the database we need to go through the type of application the organization is using. Appropriate tables should be created which satisfies the 3 normal forms. All the tables should be normalized and most importantly they should have proper relation among themselves.

We can consider on using oracle database for the structure. There should be both production systems and non-production systems. The production systems should have adequate resources like enough RAM and CPU for handling the load on the systems. We can use Oracle 11.2.0.4 for all our databases.

If the organization do not want any downtime for their application we should implement oracle Real application Cluster for the production system with appropriate DR sites and this can be build using Oracle dataguard. The standby sides would always be in sync with the production so that in case of failure of the primary nodes we can switchover the database so that the application uses the secondary node and there remains no downtime for the users. We should always apply patches on the databases to keep out system updated and if any bugs or errors are being reported in the system we should apply bug fixing patches to keep our environment safe and running.

For OLTP databases the system should have enough RAM and CPU. For example if there are more than 5000 users logged in to the system we should have around a 16 core multithreaded server with minimum of 256GB of RAM. The system should run on clustering so that the load is properly balanced and user transactions are very effectively handled by the databases. For removing wait time in our database we should properly tune the databases or the queries which are running slow we should individually tune them.