Database Types and Applications

Study Notes

Traditional applications include numeric and textual databases
More recent applications include multimedia databases, geographic information systems (GIS), biological and genome databases, data warehouses, mobile databases, and real-time and active databases

Social networks capture a lot of information about people and communications among people
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo collect their own repository of web pages for searching purposes
New technologies are emerging from non-database software vendors to manage vast amounts of data generated on the web
NOSQL (Not Only SQL) systems and Big Data storage systems involving large clusters of distributed computers are emerging
A large amount of data resides on the “cloud” in huge data centers using thousands of machines

Sharing of data and multi-user transaction processing
Allowing a set of concurrent users to retrieve from and update the database
Concurrency control within the DBMS guarantees that each transaction is correctly executed or aborted
Recovery subsystem ensures each completed transaction has its effect permanently recorded in the database
OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) is a major part of database applications, allowing hundreds of concurrent transactions to execute per second

Database administrators are responsible for authorizing access to the database, coordinating and monitoring its use, acquiring software and hardware resources, controlling its use, and monitoring efficiency of operations
Database designers define the content, structure, constraints, and functions or transactions against the database
End-users use the data for queries, reports, and some of them update the database content

Early database applications used hierarchical and network models, which still dominate the market
Relational model was introduced in 1970 and relational DBMS products emerged in the early 1980s
Object-oriented and emerging applications include object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs) and object-relational DBMSs (ORDBMSs)
Data on the web and e-commerce applications use XML, HTML, and script programming languages like PHP and JavaScript

DBMSs are adding new functionality in areas like scientific applications, earth and atmospheric sciences, astronomy, XML, image storage and management, audio and video data management, data warehousing and data mining, spatial data management, and time series and historical data management

If the database and applications are simple, well-defined, and not expected to change
If access to data by multiple users is not required
If the database system is not able to handle the complexity of data because of modeling limitations
If the database users need special operations not supported by the DBMS