"Tales of" Tunes: A Database of Video Game Musical Openings

For my Database Management class in the summer of 2016, we were tasked with creating a database and a web front-end. My 4 member group elected to create a database of the musical openings of the "Tales of" series of video games. My primary role was to design and implement the database. Other team roles included front-end development, query construction, and project management.

Objectives

To demonstrate my knowledge of database design and management, I set out to do the following:

• Create an Entity Relationship Diagram
• Normalize the database
• Construct the dataset and populate the tables

Technological Implementation

I created the database using MariaDB, a MySQL variant, and my group created the UI using PHP, HTML, and CSS.

Challenges

• The dataset did not already exist, so I had to compile it myself.
• Making the database flexible for future additions proved to be challenging. I had to think critically about music and games and how users might search for them, so that my group could make effective queries:
  • I realized there could possibly be many to many relationships between the singers and bands tables (one band might have many singers and one singer might be in multiple bands, such as for misono, who performs both solo and in the band Day after Tomorrow) and between the games and consoles tables (games are often cross-platform). I solved this by creating two line-item tables, band_singer and game_console.
  • I swapped game_console_id into the intros table in the place of game_id, thus changing the role of the game table to one that denotes plot or story and the game_console table into one that denotes version. The band_singer table, on the other hand, is just used to junction the bands and singers tables and help the user search by artists.