Chapter 1: Introduction

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

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

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 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.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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
• No ‘semantic relation’ can be meaningfully established across data
• May require complicated sequence of actions to retrieve related information
 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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 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

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 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

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 A Sample Relational Database

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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
 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.13 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.14 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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.

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 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

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 Database Access from Application Program

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

universal Turing machine.
 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.

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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 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.

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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

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