Effect of Physical Media on Database Performance

In our previous discussions, we've seen things such as some typical fields of applications and Driving Force behind databases. You Can refer them Here.

Driving back to our King, like all other things we have some factors that influence the efficient utilization of a database. We'd now look at one of them: the Physical medium of Communication between the Database and the user. User can basically need to connect to a database before getting served by it. This connection can be in two ways materially, One is a Physical Link, and the other is a Virtual link.

A Physical Link is one connection that is visible and can be accessed physically  What i'm trying to say is that physical links are generally wired media. Our cables, are the best examples for it. 

A Virtual Link is one link that can't be viewed, its a software type. For example consider a Bluetooth connection between two devices, can we see the connection between them? We can't view them, but in the devices, the transfer can be witnessed. This is what, the most easy technique but at the same time, can't be wholly reliable. This is because that, the packets of data we share can't be traced once they are sent out of the device. Since the entire transmission is a medium independent, there's no scope for reliability. All we can see here is Hardware simplicity and fast access. WLAN, Bluetooth, etc., work on this technique. On the counter side, Ethernet is one best example of a wired type communication.

Actually, this topic needs more clarification because there are many related concepts of Data Communications with the discussed one above. I've related them to our discussion though they're not of great importance, because that we're here thinking about factors and the efficiency of a database depends on these links since these vary with the data rates.

Lets get back to our discussion, a Database is generally a collection of logically related data. The data are stored in database in the form of rows and columns of a table. Hence, a Database typically contains tables. The data are retrieved and manipulated based on these tables. 

Database management means use of tools in creating a database and maintaining it. There are two main ways in database management, the first one is the traditional management system. its called Files Management System, that uses programmatic way in creating and manipulating tables. Examples are the Files in C, C++ etc. but this is less user friendly and has its limitations too!

Hence we move on to an advanced method called Database Management Systems (DBMS). This uses the so discussed, Table format for a database management. This is widely used nowadays. In the DBMS, there are two more approaches, or the sub classes for it. They are the Relational DBMS and Object Oriented Databases.



DBMS:-

•  RDBMS

• OODBMS or ODBMS 

Relational Database is one which has a relation between the values of the table. The table is itself treated as a relation and we apply our relational mathematics on it. Object Oriented approach of the RDBMS is the next type called ODBMS. We'll have a detail account of these things and also beginning of the syntactical approach in our next discussion.