In: Computer Science
Write a three page overview of what you learned about databases for this assignment. Use APA (Links to an external site.) style, double spaces and 12 point Arial font. On page one explain a few topic that you can now understand about database systems and their information power. Followed by two pages where you see databases in uses in our everyday lives. Explain how the data is turned into information. This is your opinion and there is no wrong answer for this part of the assignment. This paper will be reviewed and graded by and professional editor. Spend time proofing and editing your work. This assignment is a test grade!!!!
A Database is as the name itself resembles an activity involving the collection of data and arranging it in a way that it can work as an asset. The Database in the digital world is a very critical backbone of any online or web-related business or service. Every record instantiated in a form becomes a piece of information for the person who is storing it.
The Database as defined in computing language is a formed collection of datasets generated manually or automatically to record and maintain transactions performed digitally. The Databases can get more and more complex and critical once the yield devised is more practical and focussed by the database owners.
They manage such huge sets of databases Database Management systems were introduced by computer scientists that is also known as DBMS in short. The DBMS in recent times comes in various capacities and utility forms. The DBMS is a software machinated to for storing and retrieving user’s data while considering appropriate security and legal measures. It consists of a suite of multiple programs that control the database. It accepts certain data requests and provides the same to the users taking into consideration their usage and querying rights. It generally is an interface between the data and the software application. A DBMS facilitates the control and monitoring or more specifically the administrative operations like performance monitoring, tuning, and backup or recovery. Some popular database software of DBMS is MySQL, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, dBase, FileMaker Pro, etc.
Data within the most common types of implementations are modelled preferably in rows and columns in a sequence of tables to ensure that they are efficiently able to provide data in case of any query or user requirement. The Data, therefore, can be easily accessed, organized, controlled, updated, altered, or modified.
Whenever we recall the name of Databases, the most prominent language that comes into the picture is Structured Query Language also called SQL. It is considered as a programming language and used by nearly all the relational database management systems to work with the maintenance of the data. SQL, as a language was initially bootstrapped by IBM in the year 1970 with Oracle as a prominent contributor. This consortium further led to the implementation of the SQL ANSI standard. Many technology companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft involved themselves in this business of information systems.
Databases have been continuously evolving with manifold features and applications since the early 1960s. Navigational databases like hierarchical and network databases were original used for storing and managing the data. The hierarchical database relied on a tree-like model and allowed only a one-to-many relationship. Whereas, the network model allowed multiple connections or relationships.
The realm of data upsurges then gave rise to relational databases which became popular due to their simplistic but highly scalable and usable design. This was then followed by the Object-Oriented database systems in the early 1990s.
The amount of the data went on increasing at tremendous speed and the maintenance and usage of structured data became impractical due to low speed and inefficient connections and querying capabilities. This was majorly due to the nature of data generated being highly unstructured. The NoSQL database then came to rescue for the problems of the data engineers. In recent times cloud databases and autonomous databases are highly preferred due to their low maintenance capabilities and impressive availability options.
Let us talk about some types of databases:
· Relational Databases: They are basically organized as the simple stock of tables with rows and columns
· Object Oriented Databases: The objects are primarily representing information inclusive of the concepts from object-oriented programming
· NoSQL database: A NoSQL database is where the problem of unstructured data structure is solved
· Datawarehouse: This is a repository centrally organized for modelling and fast query or analysis
· Distributed databases: This is a situation where the files of the same database are stored as fragments in different locations or database servers or computers, scattered over different networks.
· Graph databases: A graph database records data in terms of entities and the relationship between those entities.
· OLTP databases: OLTP also known as Online Transactional Processing are catering to the need of speed querying, analysis and large number of query transaction from multiple users at a single instance.
MySQL database is one of the most used relational database management based on SQL. It was designed and optimized for primarily catering to the queries from a web application. MySQL is basically behind the success of some of the popular websites like Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Let us take an example of a simple application of database in university. So, the University Database consist of tasks related to maintaining information concerning various departments, courses, students, grades, professors, staff, etc.
There can be various sections like Teaching Section, Office/ Billing Department, Management Section, Student Section, Library Section, Laboratory Section, etc.
· The Teaching section will have access to the data of courses, students and their grades, etc.
· The Office Section will have access to the data related to the bill payments and stock maintenance
· The Librarian will have access to the number of books in stocks, students who subscribed certain books, and fines to be levied in case of any discrepancy in return date or loss/damage of the book
· Laboratory section will have access to the experiments performed by the students, stocks and the upcoming requirements of goods as per the sessions.
Another application of database management system can be the banking system. As we all perform a lot of banking transactions day in and day out. Every user is concerned and cautious during the transaction activity gauzing the possibility of failure. Hence, Database in banking systems happened to be the most critical systems where major losses are involved in even a single digit error in the system.
With immense collection of data from the Internet of Things around us. The systems get access to gazillions of datasets available beyond the imagination of any single individual. Way forward the Hi-Tech companies are using data beyond just information referencing and they are using the same for future prediction or grasping proactive users’ base creation just for their products to sale. The self-driving database is more poised towards significant boost to these capabilities. The optimization of revenue generation processes is the major crux behind every single datapoint generated. Using efficient databases and other computing tools like business intelligence the organizations can today leverage the data they collect more effectively to scale better decision making and optimum profit generation through efficient agile and scalable solutions.