Chapter 1: Introduction

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
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 Database Applications Examples

 Enterprise Information
• Sales: customers, products, purchases
• Accounting: payments, receipts, assets
• Human Resources: Information about employees,
salaries, payroll taxes.
 Manufacturing: management of production, inventory,
orders, supply chain.
 Banking and finance
• customer information, accounts, loans, and banking
transactions.
• Credit card transactions
• Finance: sales and purchases of financial instruments
(e.g., stocks and bonds; storing real-time market data
 Universities: registration, grades

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Database Applications Examples (Cont.)

 Airlines: reservations, schedules

 Telecommunication: records of calls, texts, and data usage,
generating monthly bills, maintaining balances on prepaid
calling cards
 Web-based services
• Online retailers: order tracking, customized
recommendations
• Online advertisements
 Document databases
 Navigation systems: For maintaining the locations of varies
places of interest along with the exact routes of roads,
train systems, buses, etc.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Purpose of Database Systems

In the early days, database applications were built directly on

top of file systems, which leads to:

 Data redundancy and inconsistency: data is stored in

multiple file formats resulting induplication 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Purpose of Database Systems (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
 Ex: 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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)
 Semi-structured data model (XML)
 Other older models:
• Network model
• Hierarchical model

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Relational Model

 All the data is stored in various tables.

 Example of tabular data in the relational model

Columns

Rows

Ted Codd
Turing Award 1981

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 A Sample Relational Database

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 View of Data
An architecture for a database
system

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 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 – 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.15 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Data Manipulation Language (DML)

 Language for accessing and updating the data organized

by the appropriate data model
• DML also known as query language
 There are basically two types of data-manipulation
language
• Procedural DML -- require a user to specify what data
are needed and how to get those data.
• Declarative DML -- require a user to specify what data
are needed without specifying how to get those data.
 Declarative DMLs are usually easier to learn and use than
are procedural DMLs.
 Declarative DMLs are also referred to as non-procedural
DMLs
 The portion of a DML that involves information retrieval is
called a query language.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.17 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 SQL Query Language

 SQL query language is nonprocedural. A query takes as

input several tables (possibly only one) and always returns
a single table.
 Example to find all instructors in Comp. Sci. dept
select name
from instructor
where dept_name = 'Comp. Sci.'
 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 System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

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 Query Processor

 The query processor components include:

• DDL interpreter -- interprets DDL statements and
records the definitions in the data dictionary.
• DML compiler -- translates DML statements in a query
language into an evaluation plan consisting of low-level
instructions that the query evaluation engine
understands.
 The DML compiler performs query optimization; that
is, it picks the lowest cost evaluation plan from
among the various alternatives.
• Query evaluation engine -- executes low-level
instructions generated by the DML compiler.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.20 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Query Processing

1. Parsing and translation

2. Optimization
3. Evaluation

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 Transaction Management

 A transaction is a collection of operations that performs a

single logical function in a database application
 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 System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Database Architecture

 Centralized databases
• One to a few cores, shared memory
 Client-server,
• One server machine executes work on behalf of
multiple client machines.
 Parallel databases
• Many core shared memory
• Shared disk
• Shared nothing
 Distributed databases
• Geographical distribution
• Schema/data heterogeneity

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 Database Architecture
(Centralized/Shared-Memory)

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 Database Applications

Database applications are usually partitioned into two or

three parts
 Two-tier architecture -- the application resides at the
client machine, where it invokes database system
functionality at the server machine
 Three-tier architecture -- the client machine acts as a
front end and does not contain any direct database calls.

• The client end communicates with an application

server, usually through a forms interface.
• The application server in turn communicates with a
database system to access data.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Two-tier and three-tier architectures

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 Database Administrator

A person who has central control over the system is called a

database administrator (DBA). Functions of a DBA include:
 Schema definition
 Storage structure and access-method definition
 Schema and physical-organization modification
 Granting of authorization for data access
 Routine maintenance
 Periodically backing up the database
 Ensuring that enough free disk space is available for
normal operations, and upgrading disk space as required
 Monitoring jobs running on the database

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 1.27 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan