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Introduction
The advances in the internet technology, internet of things, cloud computing, big data, and artificial
intelligence have profoundly impacted manufacturing. The volume of data collected in manufacturing is
growing. Big data offers a tremendous opportunity in the transformation of today’s manufacturing paradigm to
smart manufacturing. Big data empowers companies to adopt data-driven strategies to become more
competitive. Though data and information appear to be interrelated in a certain context, data actually refers to
discrete, objective facts in a digital form. Data are the basic building blocks that, when organized and
arranged in different ways, lead to information that is useful in answering some questions about the business.

ETL - Extract Transform Load

API - Application Programming Interface
MRO - Maintenance, Repair & Operate

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Enterprises can utilise the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor technology, along with a robust management
system and database, to get themselves well-prepared for formulating their future smart factory solutions.
Upon obtaining sufficient and necessary real-time data, enterprises can conduct data analysis, such as
regression analysis, to optimise production process instantly, thus enhancing production efficiency.

Database
Data are the raw bits and pieces of information with no context. By itself, data is not that useful. To be useful,
it needs to be given context. Once we have put our data into context, aggregated and analyzed it, we can use
it to make decisions for organization. We can say that this consumption of information produces knowledge.
This knowledge can be used to make decisions, set policies, and even spark innovation.

The goal of many information systems is to transform data into information in order to generate knowledge
that can be used for decision making. In order to do this, the system must be able to take data, put the data
into context, and provide tools for aggregation and analysis. A database is designed for just such a purpose.

A database is an organized collection of related information. It is an organized collection, because in a

database, all data is described and associated with other data. All information in a database should be
related as well; separate databases should be created to manage unrelated information. For example, a
database that contains information about students should not also hold information about company stock
prices. Databases are not always digital – a filing cabinet, for instance, might be considered a form of
database. For the purposes of this text, we will only consider digital databases.

Relational Databases
Databases can be organized in many different ways, and thus take many forms. The most popular form of
database today is the relational database. Popular examples of relational databases are Microsoft Access,
MySQL, and Oracle. A relational database is one in which data is organized into one or more tables. Each
table has a set of fields, which define the nature of the data stored in the table. A record is one instance of a
set of fields in a table. To visualize this, think of the records as the rows of the table and the fields as the
columns of the table. In the example below, we have a table of student information, with each row
representing a student and each column representing one piece of information about the student.

In a relational database, all the tables are related by one or more fields, so that it is possible to connect all the
tables in the database through the field(s) they have in common. For each table, one of the fields is identified
as a primary key. This key is the unique identifier for each record in the table. To help you understand these
terms further, let’s walk through the process of designing a database.

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Designing a Database
Suppose a university wants to create an information system to track participation in student clubs. After
interviewing several people, the design team learns that the goal of implementing the system is to give better
insight into how the university funds clubs. This will be accomplished by tracking how many members each
club has and how active the clubs are. From this, the team decides that the system must keep track of the
clubs, their members, and their events. Using this information, the design team determines that the following
tables need to be created:

Clubs: this will track the club name, the club president, and a short description of the club.
Students: student name, e-mail, and year of birth.
Memberships: this table will correlate students with clubs, allowing us to have any given student join
multiple clubs.
Events: this table will track when the clubs meet and how many students showed up.

Now that the design team has determined which tables to create, they need to define the specific information
that each table will hold. This requires identifying the fields that will be in each table. For example, Club
Name would be one of the fields in the Clubs table. First Name and Last Name would be fields in the
Students table. Finally, since this will be a relational database, every table should have a field in common
with at least one other table (in other words: they should have a relationship with each other).

In order to properly create this relationship, a primary key must be selected for each table. This key is a
unique identifier for each record in the table. For example, in the Students table, it might be possible to use
students’ last name as a way to uniquely identify them. However, it is more than likely that some students will
share a last name (like Rodriguez, Smith, or Lee), so a different field should be selected. A student’s e-mail
address might be a good choice for a primary key, since e-mail addresses are unique. However, a primary
key cannot change, so this would mean that if students changed their e-mail address we would have to
remove them from the database and then re-insert them – not an attractive proposition. Our solution is to
create a value for each student — a user ID — that will act as a primary key. We will also do this for each of
the student clubs. This solution is quite common and is the reason you have so many user IDs!

You can see the final database design in the figure below:

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With this design, not only do we have a way to organize all of the information we need to meet the
requirements, but we have also successfully related all the tables together. Here’s what the database tables
might look like with some sample data. Note that the Memberships table has the sole purpose of allowing us
to relate multiple students to multiple clubs.

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Normalization
When designing a database, one important concept to understand is normalization. In simple terms, to
normalize a database means to design it in a way that:

1. reduces duplication of data between tables and

2. gives the table as much flexibility as possible.

In the Student Clubs database design, the design team worked to achieve these objectives. For example, to
track memberships, a simple solution might have been to create a Members field in the Clubs table and then
just list the names of all of the members there. However, this design would mean that if a student joined two
clubs, then his or her information would have to be entered a second time. Instead, the designers solved this
problem by using two tables: Students and Memberships.

In this design, when a student joins their first club, we first must add the student to the Students table, where
their first name, last name, e-mail address, and birth year are entered. This addition to the Students table will
generate a student ID. Now we will add a new entry to denote that the student is a member of a specific club.
This is accomplished by adding a record with the student ID and the club ID in the Memberships table. If this
student joins a second club, we do not have to duplicate the entry of the student’s name, e-mail, and birth
year; instead, we only need to make another entry in the Memberships table of the second club’s ID and the
student’s ID.

The design of the Student Clubs database also makes it simple to change the design without major
modifications to the existing structure. For example, if the design team were asked to add functionality to the
system to track faculty advisors to the clubs, we could easily accomplish this by adding a Faculty Advisors
table (similar to the Students table) and then adding a new field to the Clubs table to hold the Faculty Advisor
ID.

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Data Types
When defining the fields in a database table, we must give each field a data type. For example, the field Birth
Year is a year, so it will be a number, while First Name will be text. Most modern databases allow for several
different data types to be stored. Some of the more common data types are listed here:

Text - for storing non-numeric data that is brief, generally under 256 characters. The database
designer can identify the maximum length of the text.
Number - for storing numbers. There are usually a few different number types that can be selected,
depending on how large the largest number will be.
Yes/No - a special form of the number data type that is (usually) one byte long, with a 0 for “No” or
“False” and a 1 for “Yes” or “True”.
Date/Time - a special form of the number data type that can be interpreted as a number or a time.
Currency - a special form of the number data type that formats all values with a currency indicator
and two decimal places.
Paragraph Text - this data type allows for text longer than 256 characters.
Object - this data type allows for the storage of data that cannot be entered via keyboard, such as
an image or a music file.

There are two important reasons that we must properly define the data type of a field. First, a data type tells
the database what functions can be performed with the data. For example, if we wish to perform
mathematical functions with one of the fields, we must be sure to tell the database that the field is a number
data type. So if we have, say, a field storing birth year, we can subtract the number stored in that field from
the current year to get age.

The second important reason to define data type is so that the proper amount of storage space is allocated
for our data. For example, if the First Name field is defined as a text(50) data type, this means fifty characters
are allocated for each first name we want to store. However, even if the first name is only five characters
long, fifty characters (bytes) will be allocated. While this may not seem like a big deal, if our table ends up
holding 50,000 names, we are allocating 50 * 50,000 = 2,500,000 bytes for storage of these values. It may be
prudent to reduce the size of the field so we do not waste storage space.

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Structured Query Language

Once you have a database designed and loaded with data, how will you do something useful with it? The
primary way to work with a relational database is to use Structured Query Language, SQL (pronounced
“sequel,” or simply stated as S-Q-L). Almost all applications that work with databases (such as database
management systems, discussed below) make use of SQL as a way to analyze and manipulate relational
data. As its name implies, SQL is a language that can be used to work with a relational database. From a
simple request for data to a complex update operation, SQL is a mainstay of programmers and database
administrators. To give you a taste of what SQL might look like, here are a couple of examples using our
Student Clubs database.

The following query will retrieve a list of the first and last names of the club presidents:

SELECT "First Name", "Last Name" FROM "Students" WHERE "Students.ID" =

"Clubs.President"

The following query will create a list of the number of students in each club, listing the club name
and then the number of members:

SELECT "Clubs.Club Name", COUNT("Memberships.Student ID") FROM "Clubs"

LEFT JOIN "Memberships" ON "Clubs.Club ID" = "Memberships.Club ID"

An in-depth description of how SQL works is beyond the scope of this introductory text, but these examples
should give you an idea of the power of using SQL to manipulate relational data. Many database packages,
such as Microsoft Access, allow you to visually create the query you want to construct and then generate the
SQL query for you.

Other Types of Databases

The relational database model is the most used database model today. These are found in many places, from
banking and order processing systems, to mobile apps, to 1Content Management Systems (CMS) like
WordPress, and beyond. However, many other database models exist that provide different strengths than
the relational model. The hierarchical database model, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, connected data
together in a hierarchy, allowing for a parent/child relationship between data. The document-centric model
allowed for a more unstructured data storage by placing data into “documents” that could then be
manipulated.

Perhaps the most interesting new development is the concept of NoSQL (from the phrase “not only SQL”).
NoSQL arose from the need to solve the problem of large-scale databases spread over several servers or
even across the world. For a relational database to work properly, it is important that only one person be able
to manipulate a piece of data at a time, a concept known as record-locking. But with today’s large-scale
databases (think Google and Amazon), this is just not possible. A NoSQL database can work with data in a
looser way, allowing for a more unstructured environment, communicating changes to the data over time to
all the servers that are part of the database.

1CMS is a content management system is a tool that helps you build a website without
needing to write all the code from scratch (or even know how to code at all).

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Summary
In this chapter, we learned about the role that data and databases play in the context of information systems.
Data is made up of small facts and information without context. If you give data context, then you have
information. Knowledge is gained when information is consumed and used for decision making. A database is
an organized collection of related information. Relational databases are the most widely used type of
database, where data is structured into tables and all tables must be related to each other through unique
identifiers. A database management system (DBMS) is a software application that is used to create and
manage databases, and can take the form of a personal DBMS, used by one person, or an enterprise DBMS
that can be used by multiple users. A data warehouse is a special form of database that takes data from other
databases in an enterprise and organizes it for analysis. Data mining is the process of looking for patterns
and relationships in large data sets. Many businesses use databases, data warehouses, and data-mining
techniques in order to produce business intelligence and gain a competitive advantage.

smart manufacturing basic data management

https://research.engineering.uiowa.edu/kusiak/sites/research.engineering.uiowa.edu.kusiak/files/files/Data-
drivenSmartManufacturing.pdf
(https://research.engineering.uiowa.edu/kusiak/sites/research.engineering.uiowa.edu.kusiak/files/files/Data-
drivenSmartManufacturing.pdf)

https://www.automationworld.com/factory/iiot/article/21200496/the-challenge-of-manufacturing-data-
management (https://www.automationworld.com/factory/iiot/article/21200496/the-challenge-of-manufacturing-
data-management)

from real-time data to database

https://chartio.com/learn/dashboards/how-to-create-real-time-sql-dashboards/
(https://chartio.com/learn/dashboards/how-to-create-real-time-sql-dashboards/)

https://www.xenonstack.com/insights/time-series-databases-in-real-time-analytics
(https://www.xenonstack.com/insights/time-series-databases-in-real-time-analytics)

data and database

*https://bus206.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-4-data-and-databases/
(https://bus206.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-4-data-and-databases/)

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