A Database management system is a computerized record-keeping system. It is a repository or a container for a collection of computerized data files. The overall purpose of DBMS is to allow the users to define, store, retrieve and update the information contained in the database on demand. Information can be anything that is of significance to an individual or organization.
Applications of Database Management System
Databases touch all aspects of our lives. Some of the major areas of application are as follows:
- Banking
- Airlines
- Universities
- Manufacturing and selling
- Human resources
Enterprise Information
Sales: For the customer, product, and purchase information.
Accounting: For payments, receipts, account balances, assets, and other accounting information.
Human resources: For information about employees, salaries, payroll taxes, and benefits, and for the generation of paychecks.
Manufacturing: For management of the supply chain and for tracking the production of items in factories, inventories of items in warehouses and stores, and orders for items.
Online retailers: For sales data noted above plus online order tracking, generation of recommendation lists, and maintenance of online product evaluations.
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Banking and Finance
Banking: For customer information, accounts, loans, and banking transactions.
Credit card transactions: For purchases on credit cards and generation of monthly statements.
Finance: For storing information about holdings, sales, and purchases of financial instruments such as stocks and bonds; also for storing real-time market data to enable online trading by customers and automated trading by the firm.
Universities: For student information, course registrations, and grades (in addition to standard enterprise information such as human resources and accounting).
Airlines: For reservations and schedule information. Airlines were among the first to use databases in a geographically distributed manner.
Telecommunication: For keeping records of calls made, generating monthly bills, maintaining balances on prepaid calling cards, and storing information about the communication networks
Purpose of Database Systems
Database systems arose in response to early methods of computerized management of commercial data. As an example of such methods, typical of the 1960s, consider part of a university organization that, among other data, keeps the information about all instructors, students, departments, and course offerings. One way to keep the information on a computer is to store it in operating system files. To allow users to manipulate the information, the system has a number of application programs that manipulate the files, including programs to:
- Add new students, instructors, and courses
- Register students for courses and generate class rosters
- Assign grades to students, compute grade point averages (GPA) and generate transcripts
System programmers wrote these application programs to meet the needs of the university. New application programs are added to the system as the need arises. For example, suppose that a university decides to create a new major (say, computer science).
As a result, the university creates a new department and creates new permanent files (or adds information to existing files) to record information about all the instructors in the department, students in that major, course offerings, degree requirements, etc.
The university may have to write new application programs to deal with rules specific to the new major. New application programs may also have to be written to handle new rules in the university. Thus, as time goes by, the system acquires more files and more application programs. This typical file-processing system is supported by a conventional operating system. The system stores permanent records in various files, and it needs different application programs to extract records from, and add records to, the appropriate files. Before database management systems (DBMSs) were introduced, organizations usually stored information in such systems. Keeping organizational information in a file processing system has a number of major disadvantages such as –
- Data Redundancy
- Data Inconsistency
- Difficulty in Accessing Data
- Data Isolation
- Integrity Problems
- Atomicity Problems
- Security Problems
So, a Database Management System removes all these problems.
Advantages of Database Management System
The Advantages of a Database Management System are given below –
Controlling of Redundancy: Data redundancy refers to the duplication of data (i.e. storing the same data multiple times). In a database system, by having a centralized database and centralized control of data by the DBA the unnecessary duplication of data is avoided. It also eliminates the extra time for processing a large volume of data. It results in saving the storage space
Improved Data Sharing: DBMS allows a user to share the data in any number of application programs
Data Integrity: Integrity means that the data in the database is accurate. Centralized control of the data helps in permitting the administrator to define integrity constraints to the data in the database. For example: in the customer database we can enforce integrity that it must accept the customer only from Noida and Meerut city
Security: Having complete authority over the operational data, enables the DBA in ensuring that the only mean of access to the database is through proper channels. The DBA can define authorization checks to be carried out whenever access to sensitive data is attempted.
Data Consistency: By eliminating data redundancy, we greatly reduce the opportunities for inconsistency. For example: if a customer address is stored only once, we cannot have a disagreement on the stored values. Also updating data values is greatly simplified when each value is stored in one place only. Finally, we avoid the wasted storage that results from redundant data storage.
Efficient Data Access: In a database system, the data is managed by the DBMS and all access to the data is through the DBMS providing a key to effective data processing.
Enforcement of Standards: With the centralization of data, DBA can establish and enforce the data standards which may include naming conventions, data quality standards, etc.
But, apart from these advantages, there are also some disadvantages of a Database Management System which are given below –
Disadvantages of DBMS
1) It is a bit complex. Since it supports multiple functionalities to give the user the best, the underlying software has become complex. The designers and developers should have a thorough knowledge of the software to get the most out of it.
2) Because of its complexity and functionality, it uses a large amount of memory. It also needs large memory to run efficiently.
3) DBMS system works on the centralized system, i.e.; all the users from all over the world access this database. Hence any failure of the DBMS will impact all the users.
4) DBMS is generalized software, i.e.; it is written work on the entire system rather specific one. Hence some of the applications will run slowly.
So, in this tutorial, we learned about the applications of a Database Management System and its advantages over the conventional way of storing information.
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