Database System Advantages And Disadvantages

History and the Advantages of database systems.

Introduction

Database and Database systems plays a major role in today’s society; as most of our day-to-day activities are related with computer programs which access database. For examples in the field of business, e-commerce, engineering, medicine, law, education and etc.

Database is a collection of organized data so that it can be easily accessed, manage and updated. Database Management System(DBMS) is a collection of programs that is enable to control the database.

Brief History about Database Application

1. Hierarchical Database Model and Network Database Models (1960’s-1970’s)

Hierarchical Databases are the oldest database models. First model was designed by IBM developed

Relational Databases(1970’s-1990’s)

Developed by Edgar Codd which provided a simple conceptual design for use of a table of records where all the tables will be linked in one to one, one to many or many to many relationships. In data manipulation it brings many resources in to a common query (eg: sql), free from delete and update anomalies.

In early 80’s this system was a bit slow due to no use of physical storage pointers and record placement to access records but later is was eliminated with the development of storage and indexing techniques.

3. Object-Oriented Model(1980’s)

OODBMS was developed to store and share graphic structured objects. It extent the entity-relationship data model by including encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance and construct to deal with added data types. Allow attribute of tuples to have complex relationships. This model is mainly used in specialized applications such as engineering, multimedia publishing and manufacturing systems. This model is difficult to be use because of the complexity.

4. Interchanging Data on the web for

Documents can be created using a web publishing language (Eg; HTML), and store these documents on web servers to be accessed by clients. Documents can be linked by hyperlinks which act like pointers to the other documents. Currently XML is considered as the standard for interchange of data. XML combines document systems with database modeling concepts.

5. Database Capabilities for New Applications

Currently database systems offer extensions to support specialized requirements for some applications such as;

i. Scientific applications – to store large amount of data that resulting scientific experiments ii. Storage and retrieval of images and videos (eg: X-rays, scanned documents, movies, etc.) iii. Data Mining - process of analyzing data and summarizing for useful information iv. Spatial applications – store weather information, maps in geographical information systems and in auto mobile navigation systems

v. Time series applications – stores economic data such as daily sales, monthly sales, etc.

It is difficult to use rational database model in above applications because of the complexity of the data structure, use of new data types, new operations and query languages, new storage and index