Relational Database

Overseer uses a relational database to manage the many entities in the school information database.  This capitalizes on the natural linkages between data entities to provide powerful navigation tools within the software while avoiding duplicate key-entry of the same information via multiple screens.

For example, a family consists of children and adults. Some information, such as residential address and telephone number is stored under the family entity, other information such as date of birth and school enrolment history is stored under the child entity, while place of work, committee roles and job title are stored under the adult entity.  However, the relationships among family members are accessible in several ways.  From the Members tabsheet of the Family detail screen, children and adults may be added to a family; also child or adult information may be referenced directly from this screen by clicking the appropriate Details button. Conversely, family information can be referenced directly from the General tabsheet of the Child detail screen or Adult detail screen.

Students must be selected from the list of children in the Overseer database while staff members, bus drivers, committee members and alumni must all be selected from the available list of adults.  Once students are assigned to a class via a Class detail screen, all class information may subsequently be accessed via the relevant Student detail screen.  Teachers must be selected from available staff.  Teachers are linked to home-room classes via their home-room numbers.

The business practices of medical doctors are documented under medical/professional agencies (or organizations) which may have clientel (e.g. a child is the patient of a doctor).  At the same time, the child’s affiliation with that doctor (as a patient) will be displayed on the Affiliation tabsheet of the Child’s detail screen.  This is an example of the linkage which exists within Overseer between reciprocal entities.

Overseer uses hot-link buttons on screens to provide short-cuts to detail information on related entities.  Hot-links provide the mechanism by which users may gain indirect access to information.  The following are examples of hot-links for some key entities within Overseer.

Family detail screen hot-links:

Child detail screen hot-links:

Adult detail screen hot-links:

Group detail screen hot-links:

Committee detail screen hot-link:

·        Adult:                          Adult detail information for committee member

 

Organization detail screen hot-links:

Student detail screen hot-links:

Teacher detail screen hot-links:

Class detail screen hot-links:

Bus Route detail screen hot-links:

Download the Overseer Database Overview for additional information about the Overseer relational database.