Yelp Database Design Project (School)

For the semester-long group project in my Cpts 451 (Introduction to Database Systems) course at Washington State University, I designed a relational database and a native search application for the dataset released by Yelp in their 2013 Dataset Challenge.

Across 3 milestones, our team of 3:

modelled the data relationships using an Entity-Relationship diagram
used the ER diagram to build a database using PostgreSQL data definition language (DDL) statements
parsed the JSON data using a Python script, and inserted it into our database
created triggers in the database to enforce several constraints (e.g. automatically updating review counts and ratings as reviews are added to the reviews table)
created a GUI application using C# and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) that connects to the database and fulfills several project-defined use cases, including:
- searching for a user and displaying their data
- allowing a user to remove a friend from their friends list
- searching for businesses in a particular state, city, and/or zipcode, and allowing for the results to be narrowed by any combination of several attributes (e.g. whether they are wheelchair accessible)
- showing the number of checkins for a given business per day of the week, displayed as a bar graph
- showing all of the reviews for a business, including counts of user reactions such as ‘useful’ and ‘funny’

Like all of the other projects completed for my upper-division computer science courses, we managed the project using a Git repository. The project is available on GitHub, hosted by one of my group partners.