Chapter 1: Introduction
Outline
• Definition of DBMS
• Goals of DBMS
• The Need for Databases
• Data Models
• Relational Databases
• Database Design
• Storage Manager
• Query Processing
• Transaction Manager
• Data
• Data can be facts related to any object
inconsideration. For example your name, age,
height, weight, etc are related to you. A picture,
image, file, PDF etc can also be considered data.
• Database
• A database is a systematic collection of data
that is organized so that it can easily be
accessed, managed, and updated.
• DBMS
• A database-management system (DBMS) is a
collection of interrelated data and a set of
programs to access those data.
Goals of a database
• The primary goal of a DBMS is to provide a way
to store and retrieve database information that is
both convenient and efficient.
• The database system must ensure the safety of
the information stored, despite system crashes or
attempts at unauthorized access.
• If data are to be shared among several users, the
system must avoid possible anomalous results.
Database System Applications
• Banking: For customer information, accounts, and loans, and
banking transactions.
• Airlines: For reservations and schedule information.
• Universities: For student information, course registrations, and
grades
• Credit card transactions: For purchases on credit cards and
generation of monthly statements.
• Telecommunication: For keeping records of calls made,
generating monthly bills, maintaining balances on prepaid
calling cards, and storing information about the
communication networks.
• Finance: For storing information about holdings, sales, and
purchases of financial instruments such as stocks and bonds.
• Sales: For customer, product, and purchase information.
• Manufacturing: For management of supply chain and for
tracking production of items in factories, inventories of items
in warehouses/stores, and orders for items.
• Human resources: For information about employees, salaries,
payroll taxes and benefits, and for generation of paychecks.
University Database Example
• Application program examples
– Add new students, instructors, and
courses
– Register students for courses, and
generate class rosters
– Assign grades to students, compute
grade point averages (GPA) and
generate transcripts
• In the early days, database
applications were built directly on top
of file systems
Drawbacks of using file systems to store data
• Data redundancy and inconsistency
– Multiple file formats, duplication of information in
different files
• Difficulty in accessing data
– Need to write a new program to carry out each new
task
• Data isolation
– Multiple files and formats
• Integrity problems
– Integrity constraints (e.g., account balance > 0)
become “buried” in program code rather than being
stated explicitly
– Hard to add new constraints or change existing ones
Drawbacks of using file systems to store data (Cont.)
• Atomicity of updates
– Failures may leave database in an inconsistent state with
partial updates carried out
– Example: Transfer of funds from one account to another
should either complete or not happen at all
• Concurrent access by multiple users
– Concurrent access needed for performance
– Uncontrolled concurrent accesses can lead to
inconsistencies
• Example: Two people reading a balance (say 100) and updating
it by withdrawing money (say 50 each) at the same time
• Security problems
– Hard to provide user access to some, but not all, data
Database systems offer solutions to all the above
problems
Drawbacks of using file systems to store data (Cont.)
• Durability
• In database systems, durability is the ACID
property which guarantees that transactions
that have committed will survive permanently.
For example, if a flight booking reports that a
seat has successfully been booked, then the
seat will remain booked even if the system
crashes. Durability can be achieved by flushing
the transaction's log records to non-volatile
storage before acknowledging commitment.
Levels of Abstraction
• Physical level: describes how a record (e.g.,
instructor) is stored.
• Logical level: describes data stored in database, and
the relationships among the data.
type instructor = record
ID : string;
name : string;
dept_name : string;
salary : integer;
end;
• View level: application programs hide details of
data types. Views can also hide information (such
as an employee’s salary) for security purposes.
View of Data
An architecture for a database system
Instances and Schemas
• Similar to types and variables in programming languages
• Logical Schema – the overall logical structure of the database
– Example: The database consists of information about a set of
customers and accounts in a bank and the relationship between
them
Analogous to type information of a variable in a program
• Physical schema–
schema the overall physical structure of the database
• Instance – the actual content of the database at a particular point
in time
– Analogous to the value of a variable
• Physical Data Independence – the ability to modify the physical
schema without changing the logical schema
– Applications depend on the logical schema
– In general, the interfaces between the various levels and
components should be well defined so that changes in some parts do
not seriously influence others.
Data Models
• A collection of tools for describing
– Data
– Data relationships
– Data semantics
– Data constraints
• Relational model
• Entity-Relationship data model (mainly for
database design)
• Object-based data models (Object-oriented and
Object-relational)
• Semistructured data model (XML)
• Other older models:
– Network model
– Hierarchical model
Relational Model
• All the data is stored in various tables.
• Example of tabular data in the relational model
Columns
Rows
A Sample Relational Database
Data Definition Language (DDL)
• Specification notation for defining the database schema
Example: create table instructor (
ID char(5),
name varchar(20),
dept_name varchar(20),
salary numeric(8,2))
• DDL compiler generates a set of table templates stored in a data
dictionary
• Data dictionary contains metadata (i.e., data about data)
– Database schema
– Integrity constraints
• Primary key (ID uniquely identifies instructors)
– Authorization
• Who can access what
Data Manipulation Language (DML)
• Language for accessing and manipulating
the data organized by the appropriate
data model
– DML also known as query language
• Two classes of languages
– Pure – used for proving properties about
computational power and for optimization
• Relational Algebra
• Tuple relational calculus
• Domain relational calculus
– Commercial – used in commercial systems
• SQL is the most widely used commercial
language
SQL
• The most widely used commercial language
• SQL is NOT a Turing machine equivalent
language
• To be able to compute complex functions SQL
is usually embedded in some higher-level
language
• Application programs generally access
databases through one of
– Language extensions to allow embedded SQL
– Application program interface (e.g., ODBC/JDBC)
which allow SQL queries to be sent to a database
Database Design
The process of designing the general structure of the database:
• Logical Design – Deciding on the database schema.
Database design requires that we find a “good”
collection of relation schemas.
– Business decision – What attributes should we record
in the database?
– Computer Science decision – What relation schemas
should we have and how should the attributes be
distributed among the various relation schemas?
• Physical Design – Deciding on the physical layout of
the database
Application Architectures
Database Design (Cont.)
• Is there any problem with this relation?
Design Approaches
• Need to come up with a methodology to
ensure that each of the relations in the
database is “good”
• Two ways of doing so:
– Entity Relationship Model (Chapter 7)
• Models an enterprise as a collection of entities and
relationships
• Represented diagrammatically by an entity-
relationship diagram:
– Normalization Theory (Chapter 8)
• Formalize what designs are bad, and test for them
Object-Relational Data Models
• Relational model: flat, “atomic” values
• Object Relational Data Models
– Extend the relational data model by including
object orientation and constructs to deal with
added data types.
– Allow attributes of tuples to have complex types,
including non-atomic values such as nested
relations.
– Preserve relational foundations, in particular the
declarative access to data, while extending
modeling power.
– Provide upward compatibility with existing
relational languages.
Database Engine
• Storage manager
• Query processing
• Transaction manager
Storage Management
• Storage manager is a program module that
provides the interface between the low-level data
stored in the database and the application
programs and queries submitted to the system.
• The storage manager is responsible to the
following tasks:
– Interaction with the OS file manager
– Efficient storing, retrieving and updating of data
• Issues:
– Storage access
– File organization
– Indexing and hashing
Query Processing
1. Parsing and translation
2. Optimization
3. Evaluation
Query Processing (Cont.)
• Alternative ways of evaluating a given query
– Equivalent expressions
– Different algorithms for each operation
• Cost difference between a good and a bad
way of evaluating a query can be enormous
• Need to estimate the cost of operations
– Depends critically on statistical information
about relations which the database must
maintain
– Need to estimate statistics for intermediate
results to compute cost of complex expressions
Transaction Management
• What if the system fails?
• What if more than one user is
concurrently updating the same data?
• A transaction is a collection of
operations that performs a single
logical function in a database
application.
Transaction Management
• Transaction-management component
ensures that the database remains in a
consistent (correct) state despite system
failures (e.g., power failures and
operating system crashes) and
transaction failures.
• Concurrency-control manager controls
the interaction among the concurrent
transactions, to ensure the consistency
of the database.
Database Users
Naive users are unsophisticated users who interact with
the system by invoking one of the application programs
that have been written previously.
Application programmers are computer professionals
who write application programs. Application programmers
can choose from many tools to develop user interfaces.
Sophisticated users interact with the system without
writing programs. Instead, they form their requests in a
database query language
• Specialized users are sophisticated users who write
specialized database applications that do not fit into the
traditional data-processing framework.
Database Administrator
One of the main reasons for using DBMSs is to have central
control of both the data and the programs that access those
data. A person who has such central control over the system
is called a database administrator (DBA).
The functions of a DBA include:
• Schema definition. The DBA creates the original database
schema by executing a set of data definition statements in
the DDL.
• Storage structure and access-method definition.
• Schema and physical-organization modification. The
DBA carries out changes to the schema and physical
organization to reflect the changing needs of the
organization, or to alter the physical organization to improve
performance.
Database Administrator.
• Granting of authorization for data access. By granting
different types of authorization, the database administrator
can regulate which parts of the database various users can
access.
• Routine maintenance. Examples of the database
administrator’s routine maintenance activities are:
Periodically backing up the database, either onto tapes or
onto remote servers, to prevent loss of data in case of
disasters such as flooding.
Ensuring that enough free disk space is available for
normal operations, and upgrading disk space as required.
Monitoring jobs running on the database and ensuring that
performances not degraded by very expensive tasks
submitted by some users
Database Architecture
The architecture of a database systems is greatly influenced by
the underlying computer system on which the database is
running:
• Centralized
• Client-server
• Parallel (multi-processor)
• Distributed
History of Database Systems
• 1950s and early 1960s:
– Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
• Tapes provided only sequential access
– Punched cards for input
• Late 1960s and 1970s:
– Hard disks allowed direct access to data
– Network and hierarchical data models in widespread use
– Ted Codd defines the relational data model
• Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
• IBM Research begins System R prototype
• UC Berkeley begins Ingres prototype
– High-performance (for the era) transaction processing
History (cont.)
• 1980s:
– Research relational prototypes evolve into commercial systems
• SQL becomes industrial standard
– Parallel and distributed database systems
– Object-oriented database systems
• 1990s:
– Large decision support and data-mining applications
– Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
– Emergence of Web commerce
• Early 2000s:
– XML and XQuery standards
– Automated database administration
• Later 2000s:
– Giant data storage systems
• Google BigTable, Yahoo PNuts, Amazon, ..
End of Chapter 1
