Question

In your own words please describe What is RDBMS?

Also provide what are possible strength and weakness points? Is it still used in today world and if yes then for what applications?

Answer 1

RDBMS stands for relational database management system. RDBMS is a software system which is used to store only data which need to be stored in the form of tables. Such data is also called structured data. We will delve onto it in some time but before that we'll try to explore about the origin of database management systems (DBMS) for storage.

The DBMS was introduced during 1960's to store any data. It also offers manipulation of the data like insertion, deletion, and updating of the data and also performs the functions like defining, creating, revising and controlling the database. It is specially designed to create and maintain data and enable the individual business application to extract the desired data for reporting and analytical purposes.

Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) was an advanced version of a DBMS and it came into existence during 1970's thus providing more efficiency than DBMS.

Strengths:

1. RDBMS uses a tabular structure where the headers are the column names, and the rows contain corresponding values thus providing ease of reporting.

2. It support many users at a time.

3. RDBMS can be normalised for better reporting purposes.

4. RDBMS has multiple levels of security. Log files are created at OS, Command, and object level.

Weaknesses:

1. The RDBMS don't fit with every domain, i.e., unstructured data.

2. Large hardware and software maintenance is required.

3. Weak Distributed Availability due to Poor Horizontal Scalability.

4. The drawback of decreased performance as if the schema is normalized we have to use multiple joins to collect together the data you need. Joins are expensive. That’s why it makes sense to denormalize the schema in order to decrease the number of necessary joins and in turn improve the performance. However, this leads to redundancy and the danger of inconsistency.

RDBMS is still used in today's world with a few examples as MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. They help us in providing visual representation of data thus making it easier for reporting.

However, with time since a lot of data is unstructured (over 90%) in the form of audio, images, text and also with the advent of cloud storage by Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, a lot of data is in the later format and is required for analysis.