A Database

● An organized collection of data stored centrally to serve various information system

applications

Basic Concepts
● Entity: Person, place, thing, event about which information is maintained
● Attribute: Description of a particular entity
● Key field: Identifier field used to retrieve, update, sort a record

Enrollment System
● Maintains information about students, courses, schedule, and enrollment information
● Students: name, current major, gender, Student ID, advisor
● Courses: course identifier, department, course name, units
● Faculty: name, employee ID, department, courses taught
● Schedule: courses taught by all professors in all departments

File Organization Terms and Concepts

● Database: Group of related files
● File: Group of records of the same type
● Record: Group of related fields
● Field: Group of characters as word(s) or number(s)
● Byte: Group of bits that represents a single character
● Bit: Smallest unit of data; binary digit (0,1)

Problems with the Traditional File Environment

● Files maintained separately by different departments
● Data redundancy: Presence of duplicate data in multiple files
● Data inconsistency: Same attribute has different values
● Program-data dependence: Changes in program require changes to data
accessed by the program
● Lack of flexibility-it cant deliver ad-hoc reports or respond to unanticipated
information requirements
● Poor security
● Lack of data sharing and availability

Database Management Systems

 ● Database: Serves many applications by centralizing data and controlling redundant data
● Database management system (DBMS):
● Interfaces between applications and physical data files
● Separates logical and physical views of data
● Solves problems of traditional file environment
● Controls redundancy
● Eliminates inconsistency
● Uncouples programs and data
● Enables organization to centrally manage data and data security

Relational DBMS
● Represent data as two-dimensional tables
● Table: Grid of columns and rows
● Rows (tuples): Records for different entities
● Fields (columns): Represents attribute for entity
● Key field: Field used to uniquely identify each record
● Primary key: Field in table used for key fields
● Foreign key: Primary key used in second table as look-up field to identify
records from original table

Capabilities of Database Management Systems

● Data definition capability: Specifies structure of the database
● Data dictionary: Stores definition of data elements and their characteristics
● Querying and reporting:
● Data manipulation language
● Structured Query Language (SQL)
● Many DBMS have report generation capabilities for creating polished reports
(e.g., Microsoft Access)

Operations of a Relational DBMS

1. SELECT: Creates subset of data of all records that meet stated criteria
2. JOIN: Combines relational tables to provide user with more information than available in
individual tables
3. PROJECT: Creates subset of columns in table, creating tables with only the information
specified

Designing Databases
● Conceptual design: Abstract model of database from a business perspective
 ● Entity-relationship diagram: Methodology for documenting databases illustrating
relationships between database entities
● Normalization: Process of creating small stable data structures from complex groups of
data
● Physical design: Detailed description of how the data will actually be arranged and
stored on physical devices

Non-relational Databases and Databases in the Cloud

● Non-relational databases (NoSQL):
● More flexible data model
● Data sets stored across distributed machines
● Easier to scale
● Handle large volumes of unstructured and structured data
● Databases in the cloud:
● Appeal to start-ups, smaller businesses
● Examples: Amazon Relational Database Service, Microsoft SQL Azure
● Private clouds

Blockchain
● Distributed ledgers in a peer-to-peer distributed database
● Maintains a growing list of records and transactions shared by all
● Encryption used to identify participants and transactions
● Used for financial transactions, supply chain, and medical records
● Foundation of Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies

Business Intelligence Infrastructure

● Data warehouse:
● Stores current and historical data from many core operational transaction
systems
● Consolidates and standardizes information for use across enterprise, but data
cannot be altered
● Provides analysis and reporting tools
● Data marts:
● Subset of data warehouses
● Summarized or highly focused portion of firm’s data for use by specific population
of users
● Typically focuses on single subject or line of business
● Hadoop:
● Enables distributed parallel processing of big data across inexpensive computers
● Key services:
 ● Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS): Data storage
● MapReduce: Breaks data into clusters for work
● Hbase: NoSQL database
● In-memory computing:
● Used in big data analysis
● Uses computer's main memory (RAM) for data storage to avoid delays in
retrieving data from disk storage
● Can reduce hours/days of processing to seconds
● Requires optimized hardware
● Analytic platforms:
● High-speed platforms using both relational and non-relational tools optimized for
large datasets

Analytical Tools: Relationships, Patterns, Trends

● Tools for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to vast amounts of data to help
users make better business decisions
● Tools include:
● Multidimensional data analysis (OLAP)
● Data mining
● Text mining
● Web mining

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

● Supports multidimensional data analysis
● Viewing data using multiple dimensions
● Each aspect of information (product, pricing, cost, region, time period) is a
different dimension
● OLAP enables rapid, online answers to ad hoc queries

Data Mining
● Finds hidden patterns, relationships in datasets
● Example: Customer buying patterns
● Infers rules to predict future behavior
● Types of information obtainable from data mining:
● Associations
● Sequences
● Classification
● Clustering
● Forecasting
Text Mining and Web Mining
● Text mining: Extracts key elements from large unstructured data sets
● Web mining: Discovery and analysis of useful patterns and information from web
● Web content/structure/usage mining
● Sentiment analysis: Mines text comments in email, blog, social media conversation, or
survey to detect favorable and unfavorable opinions about specific subjects

Databases and the Web

● Many companies use the web to make some internal databases available to customers
or partners
● Advantages of using the web for database access:
● Ease of use of browser software
● Web interface requires few or no changes to database
● Inexpensive to add web interface to system

Establishing an Information Policy

● Firm’s rules, procedures, roles for sharing, managing, standardizing data
● Data administration: Establishes policies and procedures to manage data
● Data governance: Deals with policies and processes for managing availability, usability,
integrity, and security of data, especially regarding government regulations
● Database administration: Creating and maintaining database

Ensuring Data Quality

● More than 25 percent of critical data in Fortune 1000 company databases are inaccurate
or incomplete
● Data quality audit: Structured survey of the accuracy and completeness of data in an
information system
● Data cleansing: Consists of activities for detecting and correcting data in an information
system