Chapter 1: Introduction

Database System Concepts, 6th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Outline

■ The Need for Databases

■ Data Models
■ Relational Databases
■ Database Design
■ Storage Manager
■ Query Processing
■ Transaction Manager

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 Database Management System (DBMS)

■ DBMS contains information about a particular enterprise

● Collection of interrelated data
● Set of programs to access the data
● An environment that is both convenient and efficient to use
■ Database Applications:
● Banking: transactions
● Airlines: reservations, schedules
● Universities: registration, grades
● Sales: customers, products, purchases
● Online retailers: order tracking, customized recommendations
● Manufacturing: production, inventory, orders, supply chain
● Human resources: employee records, salaries, tax deductions
■ Databases can be very large.
■ Databases touch all aspects of our lives

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 University Database Example
■ Application program examples
● 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
■ In the early days, database applications were built directly on
top of file systems

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 Drawbacks of using file systems to store data

■ Data redundancy and inconsistency

● Multiple file formats, duplication of information in different files
■ Difficulty in accessing data
● Need to write a new program to carry out each new task
■ Data isolation
● Multiple files and formats
■ Integrity problems
● Integrity constraints (e.g., account balance > 0) become “buried”
in program code rather than being stated explicitly
● Hard to add new constraints or change existing ones

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 Drawbacks of using file systems to store data (Cont.)

■ Atomicity of updates
● Failures may leave database in an inconsistent state with partial
updates carried out
● Example: Transfer of funds from one account to another should
either complete or not happen at all
■ Concurrent access by multiple users
● Concurrent access needed for performance
● Uncontrolled concurrent accesses can lead to inconsistencies
4 Example: Two people reading a balance (say 100) and
updating it by withdrawing money (say 50 each) at the same
time
■ Security problems
● Hard to provide user access to some, but not all, data
Database systems offer solutions to all the above problems

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 Levels of Abstraction
■ Physical level: describes how a record (e.g., instructor) is stored.
■ Logical level: describes data stored in database, and the relationships
among the data.
type instructor = record
ID : string;
name : string;
dept_name : string;
salary : integer;
end;
■ View level: application programs hide details of data types. Views can
also hide information (such as an employee’s salary) for security
purposes.

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 View of Data

An architecture for a database system

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 Instances and Schemas
■ Similar to types and variables in programming languages
■ Logical Schema – the overall logical structure of the database
● Example: The database consists of information about a set of
customers and accounts in a bank and the relationship between them
4 Analogous to type information of a variable in a program
■ Physical schema– the overall physical structure of the database
■ Instance – the actual content of the database at a particular point in time
● Analogous to the value of a variable
■ Physical Data Independence – the ability to modify the physical schema
without changing the logical schema
● Applications depend on the logical schema
● In general, the interfaces between the various levels and components
should be well defined so that changes in some parts do not seriously
influence others.

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 Data Models
■ A collection of tools for describing
● Data
● Data relationships
● Data semantics
● Data constraints
■ Relational model
■ Entity-Relationship data model (mainly for database design)
■ Object-based data models (Object-oriented and Object-relational)
■ Semistructured data model (XML)
■ Other older models:
●Network model
●Hierarchical model

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 Relational Model
■ All the data is stored in various tables.
■ Example of tabular data in the relational model Columns

Rows

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 A Sample Relational Database

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 Data Definition Language (DDL)
■ Specification notation for defining the database schema
Example: create table instructor (
ID char(5),
name varchar(20),
dept_name varchar(20),
salary numeric(8,2))
■ DDL compiler generates a set of table templates stored in a data dictionary
■ Data dictionary contains metadata (i.e., data about data)
● Database schema
● Integrity constraints
4 Primary key (ID uniquely identifies instructors)
● Authorization
4 Who can access what

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 Data Manipulation Language (DML)
■ Language for accessing and manipulating the data organized
by the appropriate data model
● DML also known as query language
■ Two classes of languages
● Pure – used for proving properties about computational
power and for optimization
4 Relational Algebra
4 Tuple relational calculus
4 Domain relational calculus
● Commercial – used in commercial systems
4 SQL is the most widely used commercial language

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 SQL

■ The most widely used commercial language

■ SQL is NOT a Turing machine equivalent language
■ SQL is NOT a Turing machine equivalent language
■ To be able to compute complex functions SQL is usually embedded
in some higher-level language
■ Application programs generally access databases through one of
● Language extensions to allow embedded SQL
● Application program interface (e.g., ODBC/JDBC) which allow
SQL queries to be sent to a database

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 Database Design
The process of designing the general structure of the database:

■ Logical Design – Deciding on the database schema.

Database design requires that we find a “good” collection of
relation schemas.
● Business decision – What attributes should we record in
the database?
● Computer Science decision – What relation schemas
should we have and how should the attributes be
distributed among the various relation schemas?
■ Physical Design – Deciding on the physical layout of the
database

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 Database Design (Cont.)
■ Is there any problem with this relation?

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 Design Approaches
■ Need to come up with a methodology to ensure that each of the
relations in the database is “good”
■ Two ways of doing so:
● Entity Relationship Model (Chapter 7)
4 Models an enterprise as a collection of entities and
relationships
4 Represented diagrammatically by an entity-relationship
diagram:
● Normalization Theory (Chapter 8)
4 Formalize what designs are bad, and test for them

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 Object-Relational Data Models
■ Relational model: flat, “atomic” values
■ Object Relational Data Models
● Extend the relational data model by including object orientation
and constructs to deal with added data types.
● Allow attributes of tuples to have complex types, including non-
atomic values such as nested relations.
● Preserve relational foundations, in particular the declarative
access to data, while extending modeling power.
● Provide upward compatibility with existing relational languages.

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 XML: Extensible Markup Language
■ Defined by the WWW Consortium (W3C)
■ Originally intended as a document markup language not a
database language
■ The ability to specify new tags, and to create nested tag structures
made XML a great way to exchange data, not just documents
■ XML has become the basis for all new generation data interchange
formats.
■ A wide variety of tools is available for parsing, browsing and
querying XML documents/data

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 Database Engine
■ Storage manager
■ Query processing
■ Transaction manager

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 Storage Management
■ Storage manager is a program module that provides the interface
between the low-level data stored in the database and the application
programs and queries submitted to the system.
■ The storage manager is responsible to the following tasks:
● Interaction with the OS file manager
● Efficient storing, retrieving and updating of data
■ Issues:
● Storage access
● File organization
● Indexing and hashing

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 Query Processing
1. Parsing and translation
2. Optimization
3. Evaluation

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 Query Processing (Cont.)
■ Alternative ways of evaluating a given query
● Equivalent expressions
● Different algorithms for each operation
■ Cost difference between a good and a bad way of evaluating a
query can be enormous
■ Need to estimate the cost of operations
● Depends critically on statistical information about relations
which the database must maintain
● Need to estimate statistics for intermediate results to compute
cost of complex expressions

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 Transaction Management
■ What if the system fails?
■ What if more than one user is concurrently updating the same
data?
■ A transaction is a collection of operations that performs a single
logical function in a database application
■ Transaction-management component ensures that the
database remains in a consistent (correct) state despite system
failures (e.g., power failures and operating system crashes) and
transaction failures.
■ Concurrency-control manager controls the interaction among the
concurrent transactions, to ensure the consistency of the
database.

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 Database Users and Administrators

Database

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 Database System Internals

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 Database Architecture

The architecture of a database systems is greatly influenced by

the underlying computer system on which the database is running:
■ Centralized
■ Client-server
■ Parallel (multi-processor)
■ Distributed

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 History of Database Systems
■ 1950s and early 1960s:
● Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
4 Tapes provided only sequential access
● Punched cards for input
■ Late 1960s and 1970s:
● Hard disks allowed direct access to data
● Network and hierarchical data models in widespread use
● Ted Codd defines the relational data model
4 Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
4 IBM Research begins System R prototype
4 UC Berkeley begins Ingres prototype
● High-performance (for the era) transaction processing

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 History (cont.)
■ 1980s:
● Research relational prototypes evolve into commercial systems
4 SQL becomes industrial standard
● Parallel and distributed database systems
● Object-oriented database systems
■ 1990s:
● Large decision support and data-mining applications
● Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
● Emergence of Web commerce
■ Early 2000s:
● XML and XQuery standards
● Automated database administration
■ Later 2000s:
● Giant data storage systems
4 Google BigTable, Yahoo PNuts, Amazon, ..

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 End of Chapter 1

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