The Worlds of Database SystemsThe Worlds of Database Systems

From: Ch. 1 of A First Course in Database Systems, by J. D. Pullman and H. Widom

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BackgroundBackground

• Business applications of DBs– maintaining internal records,

– presenting data to customers and clients on the WWW, and

– supporting many other commercial processes

• Scientific applications, representing data gathered– by astronomers,

– by investigators of the human genome, and

– by biochemists exploring the medicinal properties of proteins,

– etc.

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BackgroundBackground

• A database management system (DBMS or a database system) is a powerful tool for creating and managing large amount of data efficiently and allowing it to persist over long period of time, safely.

• Capabilities of a DBMS– Persistent storage

– Programming interface

– Transaction management

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1.1 The Evolution of Database Systems1.1 The Evolution of Database Systems

• The DBMS is expected to:1. Allow users to create new data and specify their schema.

2. Give users the ability to query the data

3. Support the storage of very large amount of data

4. Control access to data from many users at once

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1.1.1 Early Database Management Systems1.1.1 Early Database Management Systems

• The first commercial DBMS appears in late 1960’s.– Evolved from file systems

• Providing (3), storage of large amount of data

• No direct support of query language

• Supporting (1), a limited schema for the creation of directory structures of files

• Not satisfying (4)

• Applications of the first DBMS– Airline reservation systems

– Banking systems

– Corporate Records

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1.1.2 Relational Database Systems1.1.2 Relational Database Systems

accountNo balance type

12345 1000 saving

67890 2846.92 checking

... ... ...

SELECT balanceFROM AccountsWHERE accountNo=67890

SELECT accountNoFROM AccountsWHERE type=‘savings’ AND balance <0

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1.1.3 Smaller and Smaller Systems1.1.3 Smaller and Smaller Systems

• Originally large and expensive

• Today– many gigabytes fit on a single disk

– feasible to run a DBMS on a PC

– become available for even very small machines

– a common tool for computer applications, much as spreadsheet and word processors did before

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1.1.4 Bigger and Bigger Systems1.1.4 Bigger and Bigger Systems

• Corporate databases often occupy hundreds of gigabytes.– Retails chains often store tetrabytes (1012 bytes) of information recording

the history of every sales made over a long period of time.

• Multimedia data– An hour of video consumes about a gigabyte.

– Databases storing images from satellites can involve petabytes (1015 bytes) of data.

• Trends allowing DBSs to deal with large amount of data– Tertiary storage

– Parallel computing

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1.1.5 Client-Server and Multi-Tier Architectures1.1.5 Client-Server and Multi-Tier Architectures

• The simplest client/server architecture– the entire DBMS is a server

– the query interfaces that interact with the user and send queries or other commands across to the server

• A trend to put more works in the client– two tier (client/server) becoming three (or more) tiers

– The DBMS continues to acts as a server, but its client is typically an application server, which manages

• connection to the DBS, transaction, authorization, and other aspects

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1.1.6 Multimedia Data1.1.6 Multimedia Data

• Common forms of multimedia data– video, audio, radar signals, satellite images, and documents or pictures in

various encoding

• The storage of multimedia data has forced DBMS’s to expand in several ways.– E.g., the operations that one performs on multimedia data are not the

simple ones suitable for traditional data forms.

– To allow users to create and use complex data operations, DBMS’s have to incorporate the ability of users to introduce functions of their own choosing.

– The size of multimedia objects also forces the DBMS to modify the storage manager so that objects or tuples of a gigabyte or more can be accommodated.

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1.1.7 Information Integration1.1.7 Information Integration

• A large company has many divisions.– Each has its own database of products independently of other divisions.

– These divisions may use different DBMS’s, different structures for information, perhaps even different terms to mean the same thing or the same term to mean different things.

• Central control is not always the answer.

• One popular approach is the creation of data warehouses, where information from many legacy databases is copied, with the appropriate translation, to a central database

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1.2 Overview of a DBMS1.2 Overview of a DBMS

1.2.1 Data-definition language commands

1.2.2 Overview of Query processingAnswering the query

Transaction processing

1.2.3 Storage and buffer management

1.2.4 Transaction Processing

1.2.5 The query processor

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Single boxes: system componentsDouble boxes: in-memory data structuresSolid lines: control and data flowDashed lines: data flow only

Database management system components

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1.3 Outline of Database-System Studies1.3 Outline of Database-System Studies

• Design of databases– Chapters 2, 3 and 4

• Database programming– Chapters 5 through 10

• Database system implementation– Storage management

– Query processing

– Transaction management