An Overview Of A Database Management System
A database is a structured collection of data in the form of records. A computer database relies upon software to organize the storage, management, retrieval, modification, and maintenance of a database on a computer. The software is known as a database management system (DBMS).
A DBMS has great significance in the real world too. This is because a DBMS manages computer databases to store meaningful, relevant, and updated data. This helps a great deal to perform various productive tasks in all spheres of business and academic activity.
The history of database management shows that a DBMS was first used in the 1960s. The earliest database management system used a flat text file to store the data and used a sequential search program to retrieve the data in it.
In 1970, E E Codd, an IBM employee, wrote a paper that laid the foundation for the development of the relational database management system (RDBMS). Today, most database management systems used in the world are RDBMSs. Object oriented database management systems (ODBMSs) are the latest to be used but have not found much favor among developers as yet. The RDBMS is the dominant data model used in the world today. It uses the concepts of normalization, functional dependence, data redundancy, a primary and foreign key, atomicity, data consistency, isolation, and durability, and a query language known as SQL to manipulate data in a database. Moreover, it also uses concurrency control and locking, as also query optimization to efficiently retrieve the requisite data from any database. A DBMS also has security features built into it so that it allows only authorized users to connect to a database, and access and manipulate the data in it. A database administrator (DBA) has full access rights over a database and he controls the rights of other users to access a database through the DBMS. The verification of a user is done through the DBMS user interface through a user name and password system. A DBA also has the work of upkeep and maintenance of a database through the DBMS so that the availability of a database for access by authorized users is always ensured. It is the DBAs job to ensure that access to data in a database does not significantly slow down even in the face of concurrent queries made by many users. The users send their SQL based queries through various data manipulation editors. The dominant RDBMSs in the world today are Oracle 10g, Sybase ASE (adaptive server enterprise) 15, and various SQL based versions from Microsoft, and other leading vendors. Database management is such a significant part of computer usage today in the business world that it draws many programmers and developers to it. This is because they can bag lucrative IT jobs in this burgeoning field.
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