Introduction to Databases

Hello folks!

I'm sure its pretty well known to you that with the immense increase of technology and rapid growth in the utilization of services, the amount of data being produced has been terribly increasing. Its obvious that we need to save data after we are done working with it. this in the case of a single user. But in our scenario of data sharing between users: accessing of data by more that one individual is a bit to be thought. if the same situation occurs in an office where a single file has to be accessed by several users of several different systems, how can we satisfy their wish? we can't pull out the disk every time and pass it among them right! Or you may think to use removable storage in such cases, but what would you do when the data to be multiply accessed by people is terribly large? For example let us assume that all the files of a branch office has to be accessed by multiple users. How can that be satisfied with removable storage devices? Hence the expectations and the need broadens and the need for a stable storage that can satisfy our wish here arises. This Stable Storage is what we call as Database...

A Database is generally a Huge dump of data: a Collective Noun for Data we can say ( I'm not sure about Grammar here). This Huge dump of Data is present in some protected corner of the place and is wired to all other systems. These Systems connected to this Highest Degree Storage pass the wishes if the users to their master: the Database. The master in turn listens to their wishes and tries to quench their thirst: here data i mean. The wish sent by the user or issued b ya system is called a Request. The satisfaction provided by the King is called the Response. Hence accessing a Database involves series of Requests and Responses.

the accessing of database will be very frequent, so as the requests to the database. But the king can't delay and postpone these pleas, so as the judges do: every second counts. Hence a database must be maintained very efficiently so that it can process such requests very fast and save time. The schemes we apply on the database effects its performance. One such scheme is the type of structure we impose on the data to be stored in the database. I mean here, that the data structures we use in the database. Generally the databases are indexed and hashed to improve the efficiency of search and retrieval. Other Data Structures might also be used, we'll see that later.

Databases need not only Data structures to store and manipulate the data, they also need some mechanisms to preserve its stability while responding to several requests at a time. Here we get the name of a manager who looks after this duty. He's our DBMS...

                                                                    Data Base Management Systems

He looks after the stability of the database, and impose security and protection constraints to serve multiple usages.

I'll pause our discussion here....

we'll see the methods in which a database can maintain stability and how the database management provides this. Also we'll have a detail account on the structure of a database.