When an employee departs Altair Software, the employee record is removed from the human resources database. Is this a decent method? What is your reasoning? How do you think the organization should manage employee separations? Workers are valuable assets to any firm. Several transactions can be associated with an employee depending on their roles. Altair, for example, has personnel assigned to several departments and positions, each with its own set of characteristics. If a certain employee has transactions associated with them, such as sales transactions for sales personnel and programming deliverables for programmers, as well as payroll transactions, the specific employee will be recorded in a separate database alongside the deliverables. which will be related to the employee main table. In the event that an employee is deleted from the employee table and he has transactions, anomalies and inconsistencies will arise within the database (Even & Shankaranarayanan, 2009).
With a normalized database schemata, the deletion of a record in a primary table leads to automatic deletion of related records in the related tables whose relationship is set to cascade on delete. As such, this would lead to loss of many transactions within the database and avoid the integrity of the database. Enforcing such referential integrity ensures that the deleted record does not cause un-matching records (Adamski & Finnegan, 2011; Adamski & Finnegan, 2008).
Deleting a record from a database is not a good practice. Instead of deleting a record, the better practice would be to introduce the 'Soft Delete' aspect which implies flagging the record as deleted. Flagging the unwanted record helps in keeping the record within the database for future reference and avoid inconsistencies that may arise from its deletion. For instance, deleting a record from a table whose primary key is an auto increment column may result in gaps which can further lead to database destabilization by having a new employee getting assigned the same ID as that of the deleted records hence any related records of the earlier record becomes assigned to the newly created record (Even & Shankaranarayanan, 2009).
However, if an organization keeps a backup of their database, they could delete a record since they have a backup with which they can refer to. In the case of deleting Bob Smith from Altair database, if Bob was to come back and request a record track of his past transactions then it would be hard to track those transactions since they were all deleted at the time of deletion. A proper practice would have been to flag Bob Smith as deleted from the employee table but his record remains. Nonetheless, local laws may require the organization to delete any records about their past employees while other laws may require the organization to keep a record of its past employees. Thus, it is important to check with the local laws to ensure that the organization does not violate the legal requirements.
References
Adamski, J. J., & Finnegan, K. T. (2008). New perspectives on Microsoft Office Access 2007: Brief. Australia: Course Technology, Inc.
Adamski, J. J., & Finnegan, K. T. (2011). New perspectives on Microsoft Access 2010: Comprehensive. Coston, MA: Course Technology.
Even, A., & Shankaranarayanan, G. (2009). Dual Assessment of Data Quality in Customer Databases. Journal of Data and Information Quality, 1(3), 1-29. doi:10.1145/1659225.1659228
Henry, J. E., & Cain, J. P. (1997). A quantitative comparison of perfective and corrective software maintenance. Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, 9(5), 281-297. doi:10.1002/(sici)1096-908x(199709/10)9:53.0.co;2-p
