Explain The Following Terms Domain, Tuple, Relation Attribute
Explain The Following Terms Domain, Tuple, Relation Attribute
The other reason for the Relational databases' popularity is the simple data modeling
abstraction they provide. The Relational Model can easily map real-world use cases in
almost ninety percent of the cases. The table and column abstraction are easier to
grasp than other data modeling abstractions like objects and graphs.
Relational databases are just simpler to use, model and have established practices for
their management.
Database systems typically store data in fixed-size blocks called pages. The pages are
(should be) a multiple of the disk blocking factor. Recall that a disk is a 'block device'.
The disk is always going to read/write entire blocks, even if the read request is for some
smaller amount of data. IOW, if you call read() (in the C language) and request to read
100 sequential bytes of a file, the disk is going to read the entire block that contains the
100 bytes from the media into its cache, which will be copied into the file system's
cache, and 100 bytes of it will be copied into your program's buffer. So, database
system page sizes should be aligned to the disk blocking factor so that none of that I/O
is wasted. IOW, if the disk block size is 4K, it is inefficient to have a database page size
of 1K knowing that the disk is going to read/write 4K regardless. Make the database
page size a multiple of the file system block size (1X, 2X, ...).