Database Management Basics
Database management is a system of managing information that supports a business’s operations. It involves storing and distributing data it to applications and users and editing it as required and monitoring changes to the data and making sure that data integrity is not compromised due to unexpected failure. It is an element of an organization’s overall informational infrastructure, which supports decision-making and growth of the company as well as compliance with laws like the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
In the 1960s, Charles Bachman and IBM along with others created the first database systems. They evolved into information management systems (IMS) which allowed the storage and retrieve large amounts of information for a range of purposes, ranging from calculating inventory to supporting complicated human resources and financial accounting functions.
A database is a set of tables that store data according to a certain scheme, like one-to-many relationships. It makes use of primary keys to identify records and allows cross-references between tables. Each table has a collection of fields, referred to as attributes, that provide information about data entities. Relational models, invented by E. F. “TedCodd Codd in the 1970s at IBM, are the most used database type today. This design is based on normalizing the data, making it more easy to use. It also makes it simpler to update data since it eliminates the need to update several databases.
The majority of DBMSs are able to support various types of databases, by providing different levels of external and internal organization. The internal level focuses on costs, scalability, and other operational issues such as the design of the database’s physical storage. The external level is the representation of the database on user interfaces and applications. It could comprise a mix of external views based on different data models and may also include virtual tables that are tct-systems.com computed using generic data to improve the performance.