In: Operations Management
Database is a collection of data stored electronically and support storage and manipulation of data. Data are used in the organization by different people in different departments. While building a database organization should consider content, access, logical structure, physical organization and security system of data base.
The data elements or their values are the content of data. The relationship among these data elements represents structure in the data. The data base designer should carefully distinguish the structure and content of data.
Entity relationship diagrams can be used to get relationship among entity in organization. Relational data models use two dimensional tables. Tables are linked by common data elements which are used to access data. Each row in the relational data base table represents record and each column represents an attribute.
Data base management system (DBMS) is a group of programs used to interface between data and user. When an application asks data from the database it shows logical access path. The actual retrieval of data happens through a physical access path. Logical record is what record contains and physical record is where the record is stored. The logical structure of data base is similar to physical organization of computers memory.
Data model is one of the tools that data base designers used to show the relationship among logical structure and data which is also a map of entities and their relationships. Data modeling involves analyzing the data needs of an organization and provides idea for building data base and information system. Organization should consider various aspects like access, content, logical and physical structure etc while building a data base in order to achieve its objectives.