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Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11

Spreadsheets to Relational Data

Learners migrate a messy shared spreadsheet, the Cedar Valley Community Garden's volunteer sheet, into a relational design step by step. They find the entities hidden in a flat sheet and the anomalies its repeated facts cause, choose stable primary keys, make values atomic, split tables so each fact is stored once, link them with foreign keys, compare spreadsheet lookups with database joins, check referential integrity while loading, and document the result in a data dictionary.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 105 minutes
  • Check what you learned: 10 questions
  • Ways to answer: fill in the blanks, choose an answer, trace code, highlight a text, match pairs and type a number
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What learners will discover

  • Analyze a flat spreadsheet to identify the entities it mixes together and the update, insertion and deletion anomalies caused by its repeated facts.
  • Choose primary keys that are unique, always present and stable, and restructure lists and repeating columns so every cell holds one value (first normal form).
  • Decompose a flat sheet into related tables so each fact is stored once (simplified second and third normal form), link them with foreign keys, and order the steps of a migration.
  • Compare spreadsheet lookups with database joins, apply referential integrity rules when loading and deleting data, and document a design in a data dictionary.

Lessons

  1. Reading a flat sheet for entities and anomalies 7 steps4 practiceabout 26 min
  2. Keys and atomic values 7 steps4 practiceabout 25 min
  3. Splitting tables so each fact lives once 6 steps3 practiceabout 27 min
  4. Lookups, joins, integrity and the data dictionary 8 steps4 practiceabout 27 min
  5. Check what you learned 10 questions at the end

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