Principles of Information

and Data Management

Abraham Gale
Fall 2024
Chapter 1: Introduction

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

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

● What is a Database System?

● Why Use Database Systems?
● What is a Data Model?
What is a Database
System?

● A database system is a piece of

software that allows applications to ask
queries about the data and Tell the
software about updates to the data or
new data
● Ask queries can be as simple as
retrieving a single number or as
complex as producing a function run
over the entire dataset 4
Why have a database
system?

● Computational Tasks:
– Airline reservation
– Banking
– Watching online video
– Writing a paper
– Training and running a machine learning model
– Searching a document
– Searching a file system
– Searching the internet

5
Formal Database
Advantages
● Scalability
● Multiple Access
● Data Security
● Uniform Data Governance
● Efficiency
● Reliability
● Data Integrity
● Crash Recovery
● Maintainability
● Physical Data Independence
● Atomicity
● Data Centralization

6
Informal Database
Advantages

● Flexibility
● Schema changes

● Lower Complexity Burden

● Lower Cost (in some cases)

7
What context is each one
better for?

● When would we want a compromise?

8
OLTP (Online Transaction
Processing)

● Small amount of data each ask

● Random access
● Data is current state of the world
● Gigabytes to Terabytes
●

9
OLAP (Online Analytic
Processing)

● Large amount of data each ask

● Bulk or streaming
● Data represents some idea to be
analyzed (history)
● Terabytes or more

10
What context is each one
better for?

● When would we want a compromise?

11
 Outline

Database-System Applications
Purpose of Database Systems
View of Data
Database Languages
Database Design
Database Engine
Database Architecture
Database Users and Administrators
History of Database Systems
 Database Systems
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 systems are used to manage collections of data that are:
Highly valuable
Relatively large
Accessed by multiple users and applications, often at the same
time.
A modern database system is a complex software system whose task is
to manage a large, complex collection of data.
Databases touch all aspects of our lives
Database Applications Examples

▪ Enterprise Information
Sales: customers, products, purchases
Accounting: payments, receipts, assets
Human Resources: Information about employees, salaries, payroll
taxes.
▪ Manufacturing: management of production, inventory, orders, supply
chain.
▪ Banking and finance
customer information, accounts, loans, and banking transactions.
Credit card transactions
Finance: sales and purchases of financial instruments (e.g., stocks
and bonds; storing real-time market data
▪ Universities: registration, grades
Database Applications Examples (Cont.)

▪ Airlines: reservations, schedules

▪ Telecommunication: records of calls, texts, and data usage, generating
monthly bills, maintaining balances on prepaid calling cards
▪ Web-based services
Online retailers: order tracking, customized recommendations
Online advertisements
▪ Document databases
▪ Navigation systems: For maintaining the locations of varies places of
interest along with the exact routes of roads, train systems, buses, etc.
 Purpose of Database Systems

In the early days, database applications were built directly on top of file
systems, which leads to:

▪ Data redundancy and inconsistency: data is stored in multiple file

formats resulting induplication 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
 Purpose of Database Systems (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
Ex: 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
 University Database Example
▪ In this text we will be using a university database to illustrate all the
concepts
▪ Data consists of information about:
Students
Instructors
Classes
▪ 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
▪I will also include other examples to extend the relevance
 View of Data
A database system is a collection of interrelated data and a set of
programs that allow users to access and modify these data.
A major purpose of a database system is to provide users with an abstract
view of the data.
Data models
A collection of conceptual tools for describing data, data
relationships, data semantics, and consistency constraints.
Data abstraction
Hide the complexity of data structures to represent data in the
database from users through several levels of data abstraction.
 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)
▪ Semi-structured data model (XML)
▪ Other older models:
Network model
Hierarchical model
 Relational Model
▪ All the data is stored in various tables.
▪ Example of tabular data in the relational model
Columns

Rows

Ted Codd
Turing Award 1981
A Sample Relational Database
 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.
 View of Data
An architecture for a database system
 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
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

▪ 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.
Syllabus Review
Textbook Slides

PRO CONs

● Can be very thorough ● A bit wordy

● Contains a lot of information ● Not very well illustrated
● Relatively clearly written ● No information at all on
modern technology
● Designed for a highly slide
reading lecture style
 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
Primary key (ID uniquely identifies instructors)
Authorization
Who can access what
 Data Manipulation Language (DML)
▪ Language for accessing and updating the data organized by the
appropriate data model
DML also known as query language
▪ There are basically two types of data-manipulation
language
Procedural DML -- require a user to specify what data are
needed and how to get those data.
Declarative DML -- require a user to specify what data are
needed without specifying how to get those data.
▪ Declarative DMLs are usually easier to learn and use
than are procedural DMLs.
▪ Declarative DMLs are also referred to as non-procedural
DMLs
▪ The portion of a DML that involves information retrieval
is called a query language.
 SQL Query Language
▪ SQL query language is nonprocedural. A query takes as input several
tables (possibly only one) and always returns a single table.
▪ Example to find all instructors in Comp. Sci. dept
select name
from instructor
where dept_name = 'Comp. Sci.'
▪ 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
Database Access from Application Program

▪ Non-procedural query languages such as SQL are not as powerful as a

universal Turing machine.
▪ That is the point
By limiting ourselves, we produce better applications
▪ SQL does not support actions such as input from users, output to
displays, or communication over the network.
▪ Such computations and actions must be written in a host language, such
as C/C++, Java or Python, with embedded SQL queries that access the
data in the database.
▪ Application programs -- are programs that are used to interact with the
database in this fashion.
 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
 Database Engine

▪ A database system is partitioned into modules that deal with each of the
responsibilities of the overall system.
▪ The functional components of a database system can be divided into
The storage manager,
The query processor component,
The transaction management component.
 Storage Manager

▪ 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
▪ The storage manager components include:
Authorization and integrity manager
Transaction manager
File manager
Buffer manager
 Storage Manager (Cont.)

▪ The storage manager implements several data structures as part of the

physical system implementation:
Data files -- store the database itself
Data dictionary -- stores metadata about the structure of the
database, in particular the schema of the database.
Indices -- can provide fast access to data items. A database index
provides pointers to those data items that hold a particular value.
 Query Processor

▪ The query processor components include:

DDL interpreter -- interprets DDL statements and records the
definitions in the data dictionary.
DML compiler -- translates DML statements in a query language into
an evaluation plan consisting of low-level instructions that the query
evaluation engine understands.
The DML compiler performs query optimization; that is, it picks the
lowest cost evaluation plan from among the various alternatives.
Query evaluation engine -- executes low-level instructions generated
by the DML compiler.
 Query Processing
1. Parsing and translation
2. Optimization
3. Evaluation
 Transaction Management

▪ 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.
 Database Architecture

▪ Centralized databases
One to a few cores, shared memory
▪ Client-server,
One server machine executes work on behalf of multiple client
machines.
▪ Parallel databases
Many core shared memory
Shared disk
Shared nothing
▪ Distributed databases
Geographical distribution
Schema/data heterogeneity
 Database Architecture
(Centralized/Shared-Memory)
 Database Applications

Database applications are usually partitioned into two or three parts

▪ Two-tier architecture -- the application resides at the client machine,

where it invokes database system functionality at the server machine
▪ Three-tier architecture -- the client machine acts as a front end and
does not contain any direct database calls.
The client end communicates with an application server, usually
through a forms interface.
The application server in turn communicates with a database
system to access data.
Two-tier and three-tier architectures
Database Users
 Database Administrator
A person who has central control over the system is called a database
administrator (DBA). Functions of a DBA include:

▪ Schema definition
▪ Storage structure and access-method definition
▪ Schema and physical-organization modification
▪ Granting of authorization for data access
▪ Routine maintenance
▪ Periodically backing up the database
▪ Ensuring that enough free disk space is available for normal
operations, and upgrading disk space as required
▪ Monitoring jobs running on the database
 History of Database Systems

▪ 1950s and early 1960s:

Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
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
Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
IBM Research begins System R prototype
UC Berkeley (Michael Stonebraker) begins Ingres prototype
Oracle releases first commercial relational database
High-performance (for the era) transaction processing
 History of Database Systems (Cont.)

1980s:
Research relational prototypes evolve into commercial systems
SQL becomes industrial standard
Parallel and distributed database systems
Wisconsin, IBM, Teradata
Object-oriented database systems
1990s:
Large decision support and data-mining applications
Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
Emergence of Web commerce
History of Database Systems (Cont.)

2000s
Big data storage systems
Google BigTable, Yahoo PNuts, Amazon,
“NoSQL” systems.
Big data analysis: beyond SQL
Map reduce and friends
2010s
SQL reloaded
SQL front end to Map Reduce systems
Massively parallel database systems
Multi-core main-memory databases
End of Chapter 1