Imagine you are tasked with designing a database that encompasses the Florida Tech Learning Management System (LMS) that you use on a daily basis. The following requirements hold:
- Typical online student enrollment is 3,000 annually
- Access is password protected
- There should be a feature to create new accounts with different roles
- A role (faculty, student, staff) may have access to only certain features
- Students can be enrolled in multiple courses
- Faculty can teach multiple courses/sections
- Student records must be kept indefinitely
- Users should have near 24/7 access (with one hour of downtime allotted per month)
- The most frequent operations from a student perspective are posting discussions, taking exams, uploading assignments, checking grades, and emails
- The most frequent operations for faculty are posting discussions, changing course content, grading, and emails
- The most frequent operations for staff are to enroll students, create new sections, and assign sections to faculty
What would be your initial design? Provide both a logical and physical approach. For your logical suggestion, provide an E-R model of how the system might look and then provide support that it will be efficient given the operations. For the physical design, provide an outline of strategies and infrastructure you would put into place to support the business requirements.