Advantages Of Database Management System

Challenges that faced by IUC is the growing number of students and advancing the college’s status into the next millennium in employing information technology for teaching purposes and enhancing their operation management. With the increasing number of students in IUC, the cost of implementing the system will be a struggle as the school, at the same time will economically provide bursary to eligible students. The budget needed to develop a new system will be high. The cost of hiring a database administration, database designer and system developers is to be considered too. IUC is currently using a manual (paper based, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel) and file-based system across the organizations where each department owns and keep separate

Task 2 Question

1.2: Critically evaluate the features and advantages of database management systems (DBMS).

M3: Present and communicate appropriate findings.

Task 2 Answer

The advantage of using a DBMS is that it can eliminate multiple copies of the same data. This results in wasting storage space. Double copies of data in DBMS is called redundancy. Redundancy is controlled in DBMS and can save more storage space. In the case of IUC, when the system is using paper-based, they tend to keep their files separately. For example, departments such as faculty of computer science, faculty of business and bursary keep information as displayed by figure 2.1 below.

Figure 2.1: Repetitive attributes without DBMS

It is obvious that the above data has duplicities. For instance, the student name is repeated in each of the department, as well as their address and phone no. In case of centralized database, data can be shared by number of applications and the whole college can maintain its computerized data which shows in figure 2.2

The enroll no. is the relation which consists of the students name, address, date of birth and other information. When redundancy is removed, inconsistency of data is also removed. Different copies of data are made and it is not matched. For example, student enroll number 3 lives in Bandar Seri Begawan. But in a different location, enroll number 3 lives in Kuala Belait. This happens when user only updates data in one location and forget to update in another. This is a state where 2 entries do not agree with each other. An inconsistent database is capable of supplying incorrect or conflicting information. So there should be no inconsistency in database. It can be clearly shown that inconsistency can be avoided in centralized system very well as compared to file system. Only a single update is needed to be done to modify students’ information, as the DBMS itself will automatically update the same data in other locations. This saves time in updating and