Graduate Student Database Project
Nicholas Wallen
Department of Computer Science
Florida State University
Major Professor: Dr. David Whalley
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science
Introduction
Background
In the Computer Science Department at Florida State University, tracking a student's progress
through the graduate program has been handled separately and disjointly by the different staff
members based on what they oversee. However, as multiple aspects of the students data must be shared
for various tasks, this data is often shared via email and stored redundantly in excel spreadsheets across
the department. This manner of storage often leads to hardships with regards to how the data was
managed, updated, and shared; when data needs to be updated, all copies must be updated manually
with great care so that out of date information is not kept and recirculated through the system. In
addition, various governmental and provisional bodies request periodic surveys to be done on the
makeup of the student body. Currently, this is done by sifting through hundreds of papers for all the
students and counting them manually. With a centralized system, it could potentially take a single query
to count the students on a moments notice.
Goal
The objective of this master’s project is to create a database to centrally handle the information
of all the graduate students in the Computer Science Department, and to provide access to this
information with an easy to use web-based interface that can be accessed by any device with basic html
rendering capabilities.
Requirements
Requirements for the system fall into three categories, those tending towards the usability of the
system, those towards the maintenance and alteration of the system, and those towards the security of
the system. For the first requirement, accessibility was addressed by making the system accessible
from the web via a standard web...