Database Management System [Lesson 1]

A collection of programs that enables you to store, modify, and extract

information from a database. There are many different types of DBMSs, ranging
from small systems that run on personal computers to huge systems that run on
mainframes. The following are examples of database applications:
 computerized library systems
 automated teller machines
 flight reservation systems
 computerized parts inventory systems

From a technical standpoint, DBMSs can differ widely. The terms relational,
network, flat, and hierarchical all refer to the way a DBMS organizes information
internally. The internal organization can affect how quickly and flexibly you can
extract information.

Requests for information from a database are made in the form of a query, which
is a stylized question. For example, the query
SELECT ALL WHERE NAME = "SMITH" AND AGE > 35
requests all records in which the NAME field is SMITH and the AGE field is
greater than 35. The set of rules for constructing queries is known as a query
language. Different DBMSs support different query languages, although there is
a semi-standardized query language called SQL (structured query language).
Sophisticated languages for managing database systems are called fourth-
generation languages, or 4GLs for short.

The information from a database can be presented in a variety of formats. Most

DBMSs include a report writer program that enables you to output data in the
form of a report. Many DBMSs also include a graphics component that enables
you to output information in the form of graphs and charts.

Program
An organized list of instructions that, when executed, causes the computer to
behave in a predetermined manner. Without programs, computers are useless.
A program is like a recipe. It contains a list of ingredients (called variables) and a
list of directions (called statements) that tell the computer what to do with the
variables. The variables can represent numeric data, text, or graphical images.
There are many programming languages -- C, C++, Pascal, BASIC, FORTRAN,
COBOL, and LISP are just a few. These are all high-level languages. One can
also write programs in low-level languages called assembly languages, although
this is more difficult. Low-level languages are closer to the language used by a
computer, while high-level languages are closer to human languages.
Eventually, every program must be translated into a machine language that the
computer can understand. Compilers, interpreters, and assemblers perform this
translation.

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When you buy software, you normally buy an executable version of a program.
This means that the program is already in machine language -- it has already
been compiled and assembled and is ready to execute.

Store
To copy data from a CPU to memory, or from memory to a mass storage device.

Database

Often abbreviated DB. A collection of information organized in such a way that a

computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data. You can think of a
database as an electronic filing system.

Traditional databases are organized by fields, records, and files. A field is a

single piece of information; a record is one complete set of fields; and a file is a
collection of records. For example, a telephone book is analogous to a file. It
contains a list of records, each of which consists of three fields: name, address,
and telephone number.

An alternative concept in database design is known as Hypertext. In a Hypertext

database, any object, whether it is a piece of text, a picture, or a film, can be
linked to any other object. Hypertext databases are particularly useful for
organizing large amounts of disparate information, but they are not designed for
numerical analysis.

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To access information from a database, you need a database management
system (DBMS). This is a collection of programs that enables you to enter,
organize, and select data in a database.

Run
To execute a program.

Personal Computer

A small, relatively inexpensive computer designed for an individual user. In price,

personal computers range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of
dollars. All are based on the microprocessor technology that enables
manufacturers to put an entire CPU on one chip. Businesses use personal
computers for word processing, accounting, desktop publishing, and for running
spreadsheet and database management applications. At home, one of the more
popular uses for personal computers is for playing games.

Personal computers first appeared in the late 1970s. One of the first and most
popular personal computers was the Apple II, introduced in 1977 by Apple
Computer. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, new models and competing
operating systems seemed to appear daily. Then, in 1981, IBM entered the fray
with its first personal computer, known as the IBM PC. The IBM PC quickly
became the personal computer of choice, and most other personal computer
manufacturers fell by the wayside. One of the few companies to survive IBM's
onslaught was Apple Computer, which remains a major player in the personal
computer marketplace.

Other companies adjusted to IBM's dominance by building IBM clones,

computers that were internally almost the same as the IBM PC, but that cost

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less. Because IBM clones used the same microprocessors as IBM PCs, they
were capable of running the same software. Over the years, IBM has lost much
of its influence in directing the evolution of PCs. The industry or the marketplace
has not accepted many of its innovations, such as the MCA expansion bus and
the OS/2 operating system.

Today, the world of personal computers is basically divided between Apple

Macintoshes and PCs. The principal characteristics of personal computers are
that they are single-user systems and are based on microprocessors. However,
although personal computers are designed as single-user systems, it is common
to link them together to form a network. In terms of power, there is great variety.
At the high end, the distinction between personal computers and workstations
has faded. High-end models of the Macintosh and PC offer the same computing
power and graphics capability as low-end workstations by Sun Microsystems,
Hewlett-Packard, and DEC.

Evolution of the Database Technology    

During the past three decades, the database technology for information systems
has undergone four generations of evolution, and the fifth generation database
technology is currently under development. The transition from one generation to
the next has always been necessitated by the ever-increasing complexity of
database applications and the cost of implementing, maintaining, and extending
these applications. The first generation was file system, such as ISAM and
VSAM. The second generation was hierarchical database systems, such as IMS
and System 2000. The third generation was CODASYL database systems, such
as IDS, TOTAL, ADABAS, IDMS, etc. The second and third generation systems
realized the sharing of an integrated database among many users within an
application environment. The lack of data independence and the tedious
navigational access to the database gave rise to the fourth-generation database
technology, namely relational database technology.

Relational database technology is characterized by the notion of a declarative

query. A richer data model and a richer set of database facilities necessary to
meet the requirements of applications beyond the business data-processing
applications for which the first four generations of database technology have
been developed will characterize fifth-generation database technology.
The transition from one generation to the next of the database technology has
been marked by the offloading of some tedious and repetitive bookkeeping
functions from the applications into the database system. This has made it easy
for the application programmers to program database application; however, it
made the performance of database systems a major problem, and required
considerable research and development to increase the performance of the new
generation database systems to an acceptable level. This point was particularly
true with the transition into the area of relational databases. The introduction of
declarative queries in relational databases relieved application programmers of
the tedious chore of programming navigational retrieval of records from the

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database. However, a major new component, namely the query optimizer, had to
be added to the database system to automatically arrive at an optimal plan for
executing any given query, such that the plan will make use of appropriate
access methods available in the system.

During the 1970s research and development activities in databases were

focused on realizing the relational database technology. These efforts culminated
in the introduction of commercially available systems in late 70s and early 80s,
such as Oracle, SQL/DB and DB2 and INGRES. However, relational database
technology, just as each of the previous generation database technology, was
developed for the conventional business data-processing applications, such as
inventory control, payroll, accounts, and so on. Attempts to make use of
relational database technology in a wide variety of other types of application have
quickly exposed several serious shortcomings of the relational and past-
generation database technology. These applications include computer-aided
design, engineering, software engineering and manufacturing (CAD, CAE, CASE
and CAM) systems and applications that run on them; knowledge-based systems
(expert systems and expert system shells); multimedia systems which deal with
images, voice, and textual documents and programming language systems.

Relational and past-generation database systems will henceforth be called

conventional database systems.
Let us review several of the well-known shortcomings of the conventional
database technology:
 A conventional data model, especially the relational model, is too simple
for modeling complex nested entities, such as design and engineering
objects, and complex documents.
 Conventional database systems support only a limited set of atomic data
types, such as integer, string, etc. they do not support general data types
found in programming languages.
 The performance of conventional database systems, especially relational
database systems, is unacceptable for various types of compute-intensive
applications, such as simulation programs in computer-aided design and
programming language environments.
 Application programs are implemented in some algorithmic programming
language (such as COBOL, FORTRAN, C) and some database language
embedded in it. Database languages are very different from programming
languages, in both data model and data structure. This impedance-
mismatch problem motivated the development of fourth-generation
languages (4GL).
 The model of transactions supported in conventional database systems is
inappropriate for long-duration transactions necessary in interactive,
cooperative design environments. Conventional database systems do not
support facilities for representing and managing the temporal dimension in
databases, including the notion of time and versions of objects and
schema, and change notifications.

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The discovery of the shortcomings of conventional database technology has
provided impetus for database professionals for the most of the 1980s to pave
the way for the fifth-generation of the database technology. The next-generation
database technology must necessarily build on conventional database
technology and incorporate solutions to many of the problems outlined above in
order to meet requirements of the current and newly emerging database
applications.

There are currently at least two proposed approaches for transitioning from
fourth-generation database technology to the fifth-generation technology:
extended relational database technology and object-oriented database
technology. The fundamental differences between them are the basic data model
and the database language. The extended relational approach starts with the
relational model of data and a relational query language, and extends them in
various ways to allow the modeling and manipulation of additional semantic
relationships and database facilities. POSTGRES is the best-known next-
generation database system, which is based on the extended relational
approach. The object-oriented approach, adopted in MCC's ORION system and
number of others systems (such as Ontos, GemStone, IRIS, O2...) starts with an
object-oriented data model and a database language that captures it, and
extends them in various ways to allow additional capabilities.

One important point which we must recognize is that an object-oriented data

model is a more natural basis than an extended relational model for addressing
some of the deficiencies of the conventional database technology previously
outlined; for example, support for general data types, nested objects, and support
for compute-intensive applications.

There are important differences between an object-oriented data model and the
relational data model. An object-oriented data model includes the object-oriented
concepts of encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism; these concepts are
not part of the conventional models of data. The difference between an object-
oriented database systems and a non-object-oriented database systems is that
an object-oriented database system can directly support the needs of the
applications that create and manage objects that have the object-oriented
semantics, namely object-oriented programming languages or applications
designed in an object-oriented style.

Further, an object-oriented programming language may be extended into a

unified programming and database language. The resulting language is subject
to the problem of impedance mismatch to a far less extent than the approach of
embedding a current-generation database language in one of the conventional
programming languages. The reason is that an object-oriented programming
language is built on the object-oriented concepts, and object-oriented concepts
consist of a number of data modeling concepts, such as aggregation,
generalization, and membership relationships. An object-oriented database

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system which supports such a unified object-oriented programming and database
language will be better platform for developing object-oriented database
applications than an extended relational database system which supports an
extended relational database language.

File
A collection of data or information that has a name, called the filename. Almost
all information stored in a computer must be in a file. There are many different
types of files: data files, text files, program files, directory files, and so on.
Different types of files store different types of information. For example, program
files store programs, whereas text files store text.

File System
In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing computer files
and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. File systems
may use a storage device such as a hard disk or CD-ROM and involve
maintaining the physical location of the files, or they may be virtual and exist only
as an access method for virtual data or for data over a network (e.g. NFS).

More formally, a file system is a set of abstract data types that are implemented
for the storage, hierarchical organization, manipulation, navigation, access, and
retrieval of data.

Aspects of file systems

The most familiar file systems make use of an underlying data storage device
that offers access to an array of fixed-size blocks, sometimes called sectors,
generally 512 bytes each. The file system software is responsible for organizing
these sectors into files and directories, and keeping track of which sectors belong
to which file and which are not being used.

However, file systems need not make use of a storage device at all. A file system
can be used to organize and represent access to any data, whether it be stored
or dynamically generated (e.g., from a network connection).
Whether the file system has an underlying storage device or not, file systems
typically have directories which associate file names with files, usually by
connecting the file name to an index into a file allocation table of some sort, such
as the FAT in an MS-DOS file system, or an inode in a Unix-like file system.

Directory structures may be flat, or allow hierarchies where directories may

contain subdirectories. In some file systems, file names are structured, with
special syntax for filename extensions and version numbers. In others, file
names are simple strings, and per-file metadata is stored elsewhere.

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The hierarchical file system was an early research interest of Dennis Ritchie of
Unix fame; previous implementations were restricted to only a few levels, notably
the IBM implementations, even of their early databases like IMS.

Traditional file systems offer facilities to create, move and delete both files and
directories. They lack facilities to create additional links to a directory (hard links
in Unix), rename parent links (".." in Unix-like OS), and create bi-directional links
to files.

Secure access to basic file system operations can be based on a scheme of

access control lists or capabilities. Research has shown access control lists to
be difficult to secure properly, which is why research operating systems tend to
use capabilities. Commercial file systems still use access control lists.

Types of file systems

File system types can be classified into disk file systems, network file systems
and special purpose file systems.

Disk file systems

A disk file system is a file system designed for the storage of files on a data
storage device, most commonly a disk drive, which might be directly or indirectly
connected to the computer. Examples of disk file systems include FAT, NTFS,
HFS, ext2, ISO 9660, ODS-5, and UDF.

Database file systems

New concepts for file management are database-based file systems. Instead of
hierarchical structured management, files are identified by their characteristics,
like type of file, topic, author, or similar metadata. Therefore a file search can be
formulated in SQL or in natural speech. Examples include Gnome VFS, BFS,
and WinFS.

Transactional file systems

This is a special kind of file system in that it logs events or transactions to files.
Each operation that you do may involve changes to a number of different files
and disk structures. In many cases, these changes are related, meaning that it is
important that they all be executed at the same time. Take for example a bank
sending another bank some money electronically. The bank's computer will
"send" the transfer instruction to the other bank and also update its own records
to indicate the transfer has occurred. If for some reason the computer crashes
before it has had a chance to update its own records, then on reset, there will be
no record of the transfer but the bank will be missing some money. A
transactional system can rebuild the actions by re-synchronizing the
"transactions" on both ends to correct the failure. All transactions can be saved,
as well, providing a complete record of what was done and where. This type of
file system is designed and intended to be fault tolerant and necessarily, incurs a
high degree of overhead.

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Special purpose file systems
A special purpose file system is basically any file system that is not a disk file
system or network file system. This includes systems where the files are
arranged dynamically by software, intended for such purposes as communication
between computer processes or temporary file space.
Special purpose file systems are most commonly used by file-centric operating
systems such as Unix. Examples include the '/proc' file system used by some
Unix variants, which grants access to information about processes and other
operating system features.

Deep space science exploration craft, like Voyager I & II used digital tape based
special file systems. Most modern space exploration craft like Cassini-Huygens
used Real-time operating system file systems or RTOS influenced file systems.

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