UC Berkeley School of Information

IS 257: Database Management

Final Project Guidelines

Final Database report is due Tuesday Dec. 9, 2008

There are two deliverables for your final project: a written report and a final presentation. They will be graded the following way:

In other words, if you don't show up for a presentation but your report convinces us that the project was of high quality, you may still get full credit for the final project but lose points for participation. However, the presentation is really your best chance to show your project interactively, so make good use of it.

Normally the presentation should include a description of the project including intended uses and/or use cases, the database design, specific issues or challenges in development (these are usually presented using Powerpoint for illustration) and a demonstration of your user interface for the database.


We intend to grade final project in a similar way that Assignment 4 was graded, looking at how well it fares on four dimensions listed below. You can think of Assignment 4 as the draft of your final report, so the latter should be a refined version of A4, correcting previously identified problems. (Keep in mind, however, that we expect your user interface to be working at this point.)

We won't grade your report per se, but will rather use it as evidence of your work on the project. The report does not have to answer a pre-determined set of questions (as was suggested with A4), but you should probably similarly use screenshots of your forms, queries and reports. Please keep in mind that you would want to demonstrate separately the design of your database, and the user interaction with it. You should also show how they fit together. For instance, you can show for each of your scenarios, you could show us the form the user sees, the SQL query that gets generated, then the results the user gets, etc.

Please do not include unnecessary information in the report. In particular, some of the printouts of Access queries provide way too much irrelevant information. Your assignment is not graded by weight. You should show details, but focus on meaningful details that would help evaluate your work.

The dimensions (each is worth 1/4 of the grade):