CS 317 - Data Management and

Information Processing
 What Is a Database System?

• Database:
a very large, integrated collection of data.
• Models a real-world enterprise
– Entities (e.g., teams, games)
– Relationships
(e.g., The Forty-Niners are playing in The Superbowl)
– More recently, also includes active components , often
called “business logic”. (e.g., the BCS ranking system)

• A Database Management System (DBMS) is a software

system designed to store, manage, and facilitate access
to databases.
Database Systems: Then
Database Systems: Today

From Friendster.com on-line tour

 Other Ways Databases Make Life Better?
• “Players could finally
sign up for the Star
Wars Galaxies game
last week as Sony
opened up registration
to the public.”

• “Once players got in to

the game they found
that the game servers
were offline because of database problems.”

• “Some players spent hours tuning their in-

game characters only to find that crashes
deleted all their hard work.”
• Source: BBC News Online, July 1, 2003.
Other databases you may use
 = Is the WWW a DBMS?
• Fairly sophisticated search available
– crawler indexes pages on the web
– Keyword-based search for pages
• But, currently
– data is mostly unstructured and untyped
– search only:
• can’t modify the data
• can’t get summaries, complex combinations of data
– few guarantees provided for freshness of data, consistency
across data items, fault tolerance, …
– Web sites typically have a DBMS in the background to provide
these functions.
• The picture is changing
– New standards e.g., XML, Semantic Web can help data
modeling
– Research groups (e.g., at Berkeley) are working on providing
some of this functionality across multiple web sites.
 “Search” vs. Query

• What if you
wanted to find out
which actors
donated to John
Kerry’s
presidential
campaign?

• Try “actors
donated to john
kerry” in your
favorite search
engine.
A “Database Query” Approach
 = Is a File System a DBMS?

• Thought Experiment 1:
– You and your project partner are editing the same file.
– You both save it at the same time.
– Whose changes survive?

A) Yours B) Partner’s C) Both D) Neither E) ???

Q: How do you write
•Thought Experiment 2:
programs over a
–You’re updating a file. subsystem when it
–The power goes out. promises you only “???” ?
–Which of your changes survive? A: Very, very carefully!!
A) All B) None C) All Since Last Save D) ???
 Current Commercial Outlook
• A major part of the software industry:
– Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase
– also Informix (now IBM), Teradata
– smaller players: java-based dbms, devices, OO, …
• Well-known benchmarks (esp. TPC)
• Lots of related industries
– data warehouse, document management, storage, backup,
reporting, business intelligence, app integration
• Relational products dominant and evolving
– adapting for extensibility (user-defined types), adding native
XML support.
• Open Source coming on strong
– MySQL, PostgreSQL, BerkeleyDB
 ?
Why Study Databases??
• Shift from computation to information
– always true for corporate computing
– Web made this point for personal computing
– more and more true for scientific computing
• Need for DBMS has exploded in the last years
– Corporate: retail swipe/clickstreams, “customer relationship
mgmt”, “supply chain mgmt”, “data warehouses”, etc.
– Scientific: digital libraries, Human Genome project, NASA
Mission to Planet Earth, physical sensors, grid physics
network
• DBMS encompasses much of CS in a practical discipline
– OS, languages, theory, AI, multimedia, logic
– Yet traditional focus on real-world apps
 What’s the intellectual content?
• representing information
– data modeling
• languages and systems for querying data
– complex queries with real semantics*
– over massive data sets
• concurrency control for data manipulation
– controlling concurrent access
– ensuring transactional semantics
• reliable data storage
– maintain data semantics even if you pull
the plug

* semantics: the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs

 Describing Data: Data Models
• A data model is a collection of concepts for
describing data.

• A schema is a description of a particular

collection of data, using a given data model.

• The relational model of data is the most widely

used model today.
– Main concept: relation, basically a table with rows
and columns.
– Every relation has a schema, which describes the
columns, or fields.
 Levels of Abstraction
Users

• Views describe how users

see the data.

• Conceptual schema View 1 View 2 View 3

defines logical structure
Conceptual Schema

Physical Schema
• Physical schema describes
the files and indexes used.
DB
• (sometimes called the
ANSI/SPARC model)
 Example: University Database
View 1 View 2 View 3
• Conceptual schema:
– Students(sid: string, name: string,
Conceptual Schema
login: string, age: integer, gpa:real)
– Courses(cid: string, cname:string, Physical Schema
credits:integer)
– Enrolled(sid:string, cid:string,
grade:string) DB
• External Schema (View):
– Course_info(cid:string,enrollment:integer)
• Physical schema:
– Relations stored as unordered files.
– Index on first column of Students.
 Data Independence
• Applications insulated from
how data is structured and View 1 View 2 View 3
stored.
• Logical data independence:
Protection from changes in Conceptual Schema
logical structure of data.
Physical Schema
• Physical data independence:
Protection from changes in
physical structure of data. DB

• Q: Why are these particularly

important for DBMS?
 Queries, Query Plans, and Operators


SELECT eid,
SELECT E.loc,ename,
AVG(E.sal)
title Count
Having
distinct
COUNT DISTINCT (E.eid)

FROM Emp E
FROM Emp
GROUP
WHERE BYE,E.loc
E.salProj P, Asgn A
> $50K
WHERE E.eid = A.eid
Group(agg)
HAVING Count(*) > 5
AND P.pid = A.pid Join
Select
AND E.loc <> P.loc
Join
 Proj
Emp
Emp Emp
Asgn
• System handles query plan
generation & optimization;
ensures correct execution. Employees
Projects
Assignments

• Issues: view reconciliation, operator ordering, physical operator

choice, memory management, access path (index) use, …
Concurrency Control

• Concurrent execution of user programs: key to good

DBMS performance.
– Disk accesses frequent, pretty slow
– Keep the CPU working on several programs concurrently.
• Interleaving actions of different programs: trouble!
– e.g., account-transfer & print statement at same time
• DBMS ensures such problems don’t arise.
– Users/programmers can pretend they are using a single-user
system. (called “Isolation”)
– Thank goodness! Don’t have to program “very, very
carefully”.
 Transactions: ACID Properties
• Key concept is a transaction: a sequence of database actions
(reads/writes).

• DBMS ensures atomicity (all-or-nothing property) even if

system crashes in the middle of a Xact.
• Each transaction, executed completely, must take the DB
between consistent states or must not run at all.
• DBMS ensures that concurrent transactions appear to run in
isolation.
• DBMS ensures durability of committed Xacts even if system
crashes.

• Note: can specify simple integrity constraints on the data.

The DBMS enforces these.
– Beyond this, the DBMS does not understand the semantics of the
data.
– Ensuring that a single transaction (run alone) preserves
consistency is largely the user’s responsibility!
 These layers
Structure of a DBMS must consider
concurrency
control and
• A typical DBMS has a recovery
layered architecture. Query Optimization
• The figure does not and Execution
show the concurrency
Relational Operators
control and recovery
components. Files and Access Methods
• Each database system
has its own variations. Buffer Management

Disk Space Management

DB
 Advantages of a DBMS

• Data independence
• Efficient data access
• Data integrity & security
• Data administration
• Concurrent access, crash recovery
• Reduced application development time
• So why not use them always?
– Expensive/complicated to set up & maintain
– This cost & complexity must be offset by need
– General-purpose, not suited for special-purpose tasks (e.g. text
search!)
Databases make these folks happy ...
• DBMS vendors, programmers
– Oracle, IBM, MS, Sybase, …
• End users in many fields
– Business, education, science, …
• DB application programmers
– Build enterprise applications on top of DBMSs
– Build web services that run off DBMSs
• Database administrators (DBAs)
– Design logical/physical schemas
– Handle security and authorization
– Data availability, crash recovery
– Database tuning as needs evolve

…must understand how a DBMS works

 Summary (part 1)
• DBMS used to maintain, query large datasets.
– can manipulate data and exploit semantics
• Other benefits include:
– recovery from system crashes,
– concurrent access,
– quick application development,
– data integrity and security.
• Levels of abstraction provide data independence
– Key when dapp/dt << dplatform/dt
Summary, cont.

• DBAs, DB developers the

bedrock of the information
economy

• DBMS R&D represents a broad,

fundamental branch of the science
of computation