Chapter 4 Database Fundamentals
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Support for certain high-level languages that allow the user to define the structure of data,
access data, and manipulate data.
Transaction management, the capability to provide correct, concurrent access to the database
by many users at once.
Access control, the ability to limit access to data by unauthorized users, and the ability to
check the validity of data.
Resiliency, the ability to recover from system failures without losing data.
Data Models
Each DBMS provides at least one abstract model of data that allows the user
to see information not as raw bits, but in more understandable terms. In fact, it is usually possible
to see data at several levels of abstraction. At a relatively low level, a DBMS commonly allows
us to visualize data as composed of files.
Efficient File Access
The ability to store a file is not remarkable: the file system associated
with any operating system does that. The capability of a DBMS is seen when we access the data of
a file. For example, suppose we wish to find the manager of employee "Clark Kent". If the
company has thousands of employees, It is very expensive to search the entire file to find the one
with NAME="Clark Kent". A DBMS helps us to set up "index files," or "indices," that allow us to
access the record for "Clark Kent" in essentially one stroke no matter how large the file is. Likewise,
insertion of new records or deletion of old ones can be accomplished in time that is small and
essentially constant, independent of the file’s length. Another thing a DBMS helps us do is navigate
among files, that is, to combine values in two or more files to obtain the information we want.
Query Languages
To make access to files easier, a DBMS provides a query language, or
data manipulation language, to express operations on files. Query languages differ in the level of
detail they require of the user, with systems based on the relational data model generally
requiring less detail than languages based on other models.
Transaction Management
Another important capability of a DBMS is the ability to
manage simultaneously large numbers of transactions, which are procedures operating on the
database. Some databases are so large that they can only be useful if they are operated upon
simultaneously by many computers: often these computers are dispersed around the country or
the world. The database systems used by banks, accessed almost instantaneously by hundreds or
thousands of automated teller machines (ATM), as well as by an equal or greater number of
employees in the bank branches, is typical of this sort of database. An airline reservation system
is another good example.
Sometimes, two accesses do not interfere with each other. For example, any number of
transactions can be reading your bank balance at the same time, without any inconsistency.
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But
if you are in the bank depositing your salary check at the exact instant your spouse is extracting
money from an automatic teller, the result of the two transactions occurring simultaneously and
without coordination is unpredictable. Thus, transactions that modify a data item must “lock out”
other transactions trying to read or write that item at the same time. A DBMS must therefore
provide some form of concurrency control to prevent uncoordinated access to the same data item
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