This paper aims to create a system that manages doctoral school requirements. The management of doctoral school implies administration of information like PhD personal information, Supervisors, Teachers, and other information that may be useful. We will debate on distributed database term as the proposed database project will have the same structure for four universities. Each university will be able to work on this database by accessing its own set of data and properly using the information received. This project will track the creation of a database to manage all the information needed and provide answers using these data.Distributed Database, Fragmentation, Top-Down Design Process

Aurelian Razvan COSTIN

Eniko Elisabeta TOLEA

English

Research Papers in Economics

Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010    139 
 
The Design of a Distributed Database for Doctoral Studies Management 
 
Enikö Elisabeta TOLEA, Aurelian Razvan COSTIN 
Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 
eny_tol@yahoo.com, costin9razvan@yahoo.com 
 
This paper aims to create a system that manages doctoral school requirements. The 
management of doctoral school implies administration of information like PhD personal 
information, Supervisors, Teachers, and other information that may be useful. We will debate 
on distributed database term as the proposed database project will have the same structure 
for four universities. Each university will be able to work on this database by accessing its 
own set of data and properly using the information received. This project will track the 
creation of a database to manage all the information needed and provide answers using these 
data.  
Keywords: Distributed Database, Fragmentation, Top-Down Design Process 
 
Introduction 
The goal of the project debated in this 
article is to create a system which has the 
ability to process information needed for 
management doctoral school. Its final utility 
will be to manage doctoral schools 
requirements. After designing the database 
we want to create a user friendly interface to 
facilitate its usage.  
In order to discuss databases development we 
need to know what doctoral school 
requirements are. After analyzing this 
problem we concluded that the prerequisites 
are the following: 
1.  Recording all data necessary for the 
management, namely: data on doctoral 
students, tutors and school teachers, 
materials that are studied, exams, 
conferences and other information 
related to the doctoral school. 
2.  Data processing to derive information. 
3.  Information processing. 
4.  Creating query to display useful 
information. These queries will 
eventually be integrated into an 
application that will offer a friendly user 
interface that will provide an information 
management tool, along with reports and 
other evaluation methods tools needed to 
properly administrate a doctoral school. 
This article is structured in two sections and 
includes the following: 
a) First part: Problem, context and 
statements- in this section we will debate 
what a distributed database is and why it is 
better to create and use distributed databases 
instead of normal databases. 
b) Second part: Proposed Model- in this 
section we will describe the architectural 
solution of this complex model along with 
designs and implementations details. 
 
2 Problem Context and Statement 
2.1 Related Works  
Databases are extremely important because 
they stand behind any applications be it web 
pages or Enterprise Resource Planning 
projects.  
What is a Database? A database can be 
defined as a set of basic or structured data, 
accessible to a community of users. More 
specifically, a database is a set of interrelated 
files that contain the core data required by a 
computer system (computer application). 
Because we want to integrate this database in 
several universities we have concluded that 
we need a distributed database. One that by 
fragmenting by each university will provide 
access to its one information, but by 
rebuilding relationships will provide general 
information on all universities. 
These definitions are representative for the 
distributed databases. 
Distributed database is a set of logically 
related databases, but physically distributed 
on several machines, linked through a 
1 140   Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010 
 
communications network [1]. 
Very important is how to create the database 
and framing them in: 
1.  distributed databases  
2.  federal databases 
This classification is made depending on how 
it wants to operate within their data.  
We can define a distributed database as a 
collection of multiple, logically interrelated 
databases distributed over a computer 
network [2]. A distributed database 
management system is defined as a software 
system that permits the management of the 
Management System of Distributed 
Databases and makes the distribution 
transparent to the users [3]. System 
management software is necessary because it 
allows the database is distributed and the 
distribution is transparent to the user [4].  
In distributed databases replication and 
fragmentation are two of the most important 
properties that a distributed database has. 
Fragmentation involves dividing a global 
relationship into logical drivers that can be 
placed optimally in distributed database. 
Fragmentation should be consistent semantic 
distributed database, to achieve a lossless 
decomposition of information and without 
duplicates, allowing reconstruction of the 
initial relationship before fragmentation. 
These can be achieved through three types of 
fragmentation: Horizontal, Vertical, Mixed. 
Replication involves copying fragments in 
several locations. For that it is required a 
structure for the database that fits all four 
university and by using this two properties 
this structure will have the best results. 
 
2.2 Statement 
The main reason of this project was to create 
a database that manages information not only 
from one university but from more. This 
database structure was designed so that all 
the needs of this consortium to be found in 
this structure.  
First of all we analyzed all possible situations 
and we concluded that the top-down design 
process is the one that better answers to ours 
requirement. A framework for this process is 
shown in Figure 1 [5].  The activity begins 
with a requirements analysis that defines the 
environment of the system and “elicts both 
the data and processing needs of all potential 
users” [6]. The requirements are two parallel 
activities view design and conceptual design. 
The first activity deals with the defining of 
the interface for the final users, and the 
second activity is the process by which entity 
types and relationships are determined 
among entities. 
We need a database to manage information 
not just for one university, but for four of 
them. 
It takes such a database to manage all these 
information, precisely because so far every 
university manages its own data. But with the 
development of such a project, which aims to 
encapsulate more universities and to manage 
information from all of them this project will 
offer a wider range of information and users 
achieve a much better information 
management. 
The problems that arise when designing this 
database were mainly related to structure.  
This structure must match both the primary 
database or one that includes all four 
universities and the same structure must fit 
each university separately. 
So we are talking about a structure which 
may well manage a single university data 
separately, but that is the same structure and 
information management behind consortium 
information management. 
The solution to the above mentioned was to 
create a database that will be discussed 
further, a database that respects what we 
have said earlier. 
Next we discuss our proposed model. How it 
was developed, designed, implemented and a 
SWOT analysis of it. 
 
3 Proposed Model 
3.1 Design Details  
The choice of creating this distributed 
database and its concrete implementation 
depended on: 
  business needs, what information do this 
universities need to offer to future user; Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010    141 
 
  privacy of the database ; 
   required degree of security, consistency 
and data integrity. 
Another responsible question to ask at this 
point is: Why we chose to create an 
distributed database? 
The classical answer to this question 
indicates that distributed processing better 
corresponds to the organizational structure of 
today’s distributed enterprises, in this case 
universities, and that such a system is more 
reliable and more responsive. A lot of current 
applications of computer technology are 
inherently distributed. Because we want to 
integrate this database structure in more than 
one university, we need to create a 
distributed database. 
As Chris J. Date [7] says a distributed system 
should look exactly like the one 
undistributed. This is the Fundamental 
Principle that Date sets in 1978, together 
with other twelve rules closely concerning 
distributed systems. There for this is why we 
chose to create such a database. We will 
discuss in the following about its actual 
creation of the database. Starting from the 
idea mentioned above will create database 
that will contain tables with attributes that we 
can offer users the information they need. 
 
 
Fig. 1. Top-Down Design Process 
 
3.2 Implementation Details 
As you can see we tried to integrate in its 
structure all the information related to the 
doctoral school, namely: data on PhD 
students and tutors, teachers, subjects taught, 
exams, participating in conferences, articles 
and their quotes and other information that 
we considered useful.  142   Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010 
 
 
Fig. 2. Tables and their contents form our database 
 
In Figure 2 you can see some tables. The 
table Language_selection has two attributes, 
Id_language and Language (the language 
name) and this table is very important 
because when we are going to implement it 
we will have the possibility to chose in which 
language to be shown the information. For 
the begging in this table we added the 
following languages: Romanian, English, 
French, German and Hungarian, with the 
possibility of extending them by adding other 
languages. In Figure 3 you will see an ERD 
(entity-relationship diagram) Diagram in 
which you will find a sort description of the 
database structure. There are included some 
tables, not all of them, and the relation 
between them. And in Figure 4 you will see 
an example of a query and its result. 
With the input data we made some queries 
(the tables were created in Microsoft 
SQLServer 2008 R2), and here is an 
example. This code for example displays the 
University, Faculty and Specialization 
names.  
 
SELECT     
University_Name.University_Name, 
Faculty_Name.Faculty_Name, 
Specialization_Name.Specialization_Name 
FROM         Faculty_Name INNER JOIN 
                      
Specialization_Name  ON 
Faculty_Name.Id_Faculty  = 
Specialization_Name.Id_Faculty  INNER 
JOIN 
                      University_Name  ON 
Faculty_Name.Id_University  = 
University_Name.Id_University  
For this code we have as a result 
the fallowing (Figure 4): 
 
 Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010    143 
 
 
Fig. 3. ERD Diagram 
 
Id_Faculty 
Faculty Name 
Id_Specialization 
Specialization Name 
PhD
Choose 
General Data 
Personal Data 
Has
Has
Identity card 
data 
CV 
Phone 
Number
E‐mail 
First Name 
Last Name 
Admission Date 
Education form 
PhD Guides 
Has
Have
General Data  Personal Data 
Exams 
Teachers 
Exam_Id 
Examined material 
designation 
Note 
Id_Examiner_Teacher
Exam Date 
Teacher_Name_and _surname 
Scientific title 
Id_material_taught 
Subjects Taught 
Thesis 
Article 
Writes 
Specialization  Faculty 144   Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010 
 
 
Fig. 4. Result for the interrogation 
 
4 Evaluation 
This project hasn’t reached total 
development. It is still in the implementation 
process. Next we perform a SWOT analysis 
of the project described above (Figure 5). As 
you can see in this analysis this project offers 
advantages and disadvantages, pros and cons 
for this project. 
It requires an analysis of indicators that can 
be found in Figure 5. Strengths are very 
important because this project had a 
requirement, and that was the possibility to 
integrate this application in four universities 
and the information had to be accessible to 
all users. Also, we need a database schema 
that can be extended if needed by adding new 
information that not appears in the initial 
structure, although here we found a 
weakness, namely the difficulty of changes 
within the structure. 
We thought we would have problems in 
implementation because there could be 
differences between how universities 
implement this structure in their university; 
but it was also a challenge because it was 
something new, a new structure, a new 
information management system. 
 
4.1 Subsequent Developments 
1.  We will create queries using the same 
SQL Server environment, which will 
attempt to answer by listing all questions 
that may arise on database. 
2.  Will try to correlate this DB with an 
object approach programming 
environment. 
3.  It wants to create an interface through 
which you can access the database, and 
providing a series of operations such as 
displaying, adding data, display reports 
and other things. 
4.  All these future developments will form 
a complete and fully functional project 
that will meet all requirements of future 
users. Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010    145 
 
 
Fig. 5. SWOT Analysis 
 
5 Conclusions 
We created such a database because we need 
to fragment it and we need to manage these 
fragments as well as we can. 
This project was extremely important to 
develop since that time there wasn’t an 
exclusive management of PhD. 
So we tried to develop the structures 
embedded in it all the necessary information 
for the management of PhD. 
This is a project that requires time and 
multiple re-evaluations for the structure to be 
one that any university to be able to integrate 
it without problems. Therefore we proposed 
an approach that in time, after several 
evaluations we hope that will reach that 
level.  
 
Acknowledgments 
This work was supported by ANCS-CNMP, 
project number PNII – 91037/2007. 
References  
[1] I. Popescu, Modelarea bazelor de date, 
Editura Tehnica, Bucuresti, 2001. 
[2] T. Ozsu, P.Valduriez, Principles of 
Distributed Databese Systems, Second 
Edition, 2002.  
[3] T. Connolly, C. Begg, A. Strachan, Baze 
de date Proiectare. Implementare. 
Gestionare, Teora, 2001  
[4] T. Ozsu, P. Valduriez, Principles of 
Distributed Databese Systems, Second 
Edition, 2002 
[5] S.B. Yao, S. B. Navathe and J-L. Weldon, 
“An Integrated Approach to database 
design”, In Data Base Design Techniques 
I: Requirements and Logical Structures, 
Nyu Symposium, New-York, 1982.  
[6] C. J. Date, Baze de date, Ediţia a VIII-a, 
Editura Plus, Bucureşti, 2005 
 
 
 146   Informatica Economică vol. 14, no. 4/2010 
 
Enikö Elisabeta ŢOLEA is a 24 years old PhD candidate. She took her 
Master of Science degree in 2010 and started her publishing carrier in 
February 2010 with a first article in the Journal of Information Systems & 
Operations Management. She started studying economical informatics at the 
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration in 2005, graduating in 
June 2008. After this period she followed the courses of SADE (Systems to 
Assist Economic Decision) mastery school in the same institution. Now she 
is a young research member and she has been accepted in the doctoral school, studying 
Cybernetics and Economical Statistics under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Ştefan Ioan Niţchi at 
the same faculty.   
 
Aurelian Răzvan COSTIN is a 24 years old PhD candidate. He took his 
Master of Science degree in 2010 and started his publishing carrier in 
February 2010 with a first article in the Journal of Information Systems & 
Operations Management. He started studying economical informatics at the 
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration in 2005, graduating in 
June 2008. After this period he followed the courses of E-Business mastery 
school in the same institution. Now he is a young research member in a 
project named SICOMAP, and has been accepted in the doctoral school, studying Cybernetics 
and Economical Statistics under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Niţchi Ioan Ştefan at the same 
faculty.   

The Design of a Distributed Database for Doctoral Studies Management

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