Assignment 1: Database Consultant Services

Due Week 5 and worth 135 points

Xpress Mart is a large convenience store chain, headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, serving approximately 7.1 million customers a year throughout the North East. The company headquarters houses over 800 employees.

Xpress Mart has recently purchased Dales Outlet stores, and is currently experiencing a seven percent (7%) annual growth. The market plan is to expand its operations by entering into the Midwest, and to eventually become a National chain. The database is growing at a rate of eight and one-half percent (8.5%) per year and will exceed the current hard drive space. The main server is overloaded, resulting in poor performance and long delays.

The company currently has a 4-terabyte Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), database that tracks over four (4) billion transactions each year and pulls the information daily from each store regionally.

Since Xpress Mart is experiencing performance issues, and soon will have issues with capacity, it has decided to upgrade the SQL server to 2012, hiring you as a database consultant.

Write four to six (4-6) page paper in which you:

1. Assess the physical storage requirements and summarize the initial steps you should take before beginning capacity planning and the upgrade.
2. Outline the foreseeable issues that Xpress Mart may encounter while upgrading from SQL 2008 to SQL 2012.
3. Identify whether the growth of the database or the growth of the business is going to influence your design. Justify your response.
4. Using Visio or a similar drawing program, outline the proposed changes that will accommodate the capacity changes to the database. Note: The graphically depicted solution is not included in the required page length.
5. Recommend a solution for how the company should maintain and monitor the database to ensure proper performance is maintained.
6. Use at least three (3) quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar Websites do not qualify as quality resources.