Enterprise Database Management System - Coursework Example

Running head: ENTERPRISE DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM Enterprise Database Management System Introduction The world is moving at a fastpace. There is an expedite increase in the development of technology and innovations are happening in all fields almost every day. The world is moving at such a pace that even our day to day operations are automated. Organizations on their part have also evolved constantly. It has come to a state where any kind of recursive function in any field can be automated. Subsequently, organizations have also started encompassing such technologies into their departments. The introduction of computers and Information Systems has greatly enabled public operations to be done at a rapid pace. The growing scale of data demands a better and reliable method to manage and access them. Such a demand has yielded in the development of Database Management Systems. Every organization needs some sort of information to be stored and accessed all the time and as a result, Database Management Systems have become an integral part of every organization. Before dwelling on the reasons for considering DBMS as a critical system, it is important to understand the basic terminologies involved. Data Any piece of information that is required by an organization to be stored and retrieved for future purposes can be considered as data. Database A database is nothing but a repository of data where the information are stored in an organized way so that any kind of complex details can be retrieved easily. For example, one may have the details of all employees contact information, but to retrieve the names of all employees who live in a particular place, then the organization of the data in the database could be easily queried upon to retrieve the information. (Rob, Coronel & Crockett, 2008) Database Management System – What is it? A DBMS is nothing but software that helps in managing the data stored in the database. As with every other software there are several products of DBMS that are available to help an organization to manage data. Some of the operations that are performed by a DBMS include the basic functions such as adding, deleting and modifying data. (Hoffer, 2009) There are four important characteristics for any DBMS that determine its purpose and usage in an organization. They are, The modeling language There are several types of modeling languages that are currently available. These include relational, object oriented, network oriented and hierarchical languages. These languages determine the way the data is organized in the databases. (Hoffer, 2009) Data structures The structure of the data - either a single record or a set of information is organized and controlled under the DBMS. Query Language The query language determines the security of data offered by DBMS. It allows for maintaining the integrity of the data present in the database and ensures that there is no redundancy of information. Multiple transactions The efficiency of a DBMS is measured by the number of transactions that can be run concurrently at a given time. The level of concurrency depends on how well the DBMS uses deadlock prevention mechanisms that restrict update access to a data by allowing only one user access a particular data at a time. (Kedar, 2009) Features of DBMS The database systems form the basic groundwork for any enterprise. There are obvious advantages in handling information through a computer system when compared to manual management. In general, it could be said that an enterprise DBMS allows for easy management of data, but in detail, there are many specific features available in DBMS software that allows for this easy management. (Laudon, & Laudon, 2000) The ability to retrieve complex information The important feature of a DBMS is that it allows the user to communicate with the database and retrieve even complex information with ease. All that a user has to know is the query language which one can design according to the requirement. For example, if there is an employee database with all information stored in it, then if there is an immediate necessity to retrieve information of all employees who are of particular age and are from particular area, a query can be designed accordingly, to retrieve the data successfully. Overall, it could be said that DBMS provides one of the most important features of converting a business requirement to manipulation of data. In a very large organization like any banking enterprise, the number of customers would be in millions, which means millions of records. Even to retrieve details of customer above the age of 30, it would take a humongous amount of time when done manually. A DBMS helps to overcome such overheads and even in an organization described above, it would not take more than a minute for the DBMS systems to return the details. (Hansen & Hansen, 1996) Options to Backup data and replication Another major feature of DBMS is the ability of the software to back up the database and replicate the original data at frequent time intervals. An important advantage of such replication procedures is that if there is any catastrophic crash of data or if there is any fraudulent intrusions in the database, then the system could just get restored to its last recent backup point, losing out only on a very small amount of information. Such kind of security and backing of data could never be provided without a DBMS. Most often, fraudulent activities are completely prohibited by replicating the database copies in several servers. While following such a method, there is always a consistency maintained among the data present in the database and it also enhances the security by hiding the actual database that is currently put to use. A feature like this would greatly help any kind of organization to prevent data loss. (Gertz & Jajodia, 2008) Presence of Access constraints The third feature that makes DBS an essential component of organization is its ability to provide access to users according to their profiles. There is always a need to maintain who is accessing which data in a database. In a manual operation, there would be personnel to control the access of data but there is every possibility for such security measures to be compromised. In case of a DBMS, every user is verified for their credential before being given access to any information. The access is restricted accordingly in all modes whether it is an update or just a read access. For example, for any customer there should be only one record. If someone tries to add an additional record to the database, the DBMS notices such errors and promptly notifies the user that a record for the customer is already present. An even more exciting factor is that such rules can be customized according to the needs of an organization. (Bertino. et. al., 2011) Data Security Restriction of access to data according to the credentials of the users brings in an exquisite level of security that could be hard to compromise. As a system, there is very little one could do to overhaul its security measures unless the top level management controlling the grant access of the database compromises. Several techniques are implemented by the DBMS to ensure security within the system. These include 1. Authorization measures when using the SQL queries to access data. 2. Referential integrity of the attributes 3. Assigning privileges to the users. 4. Any kind of business oriented security restrictions can be enabled with the help of a feature called triggers. 5. Providing users with a local as well as global scope of access. 6. Presence of encryption and decryption techniques to protect sensitive data such as user passwords etc. Data manipulation The integration of computing features and mathematical functions have practically driven out the need for any external software to calculate such data. For example, if there is a need to calculate the sum or average of the total business of a customer for a particular year or for any time period, DBMS has the facilities to do such computations and return results in the user desired format. Similar to the given example, the DBMS is empowered to perform several other computations and it performs them according to the needs of the user as described in their queries. (Edward et. al. 2009) Record keeping features The DBMS has the capability to store the history of operations performed on the database. Every set of operations gets logged onto the system and whenever there is any fault in any operation, the administrators could easily back trace on the operations performed and can easily identify the problem. Indirectly, such actions also provide an additional level of security as users would become more aware of what they do and they would always be informed that their access information is logged. An additional advantage of such a feature is that the access to log information is available only to the administrators of the system. This reduces any chance of compromise that could happen with the log information. Also, the log history never gets deleted, as there is always a possibility to revisit the actions performed on any particular day. (Edward et. al. 2009) Optimization of data In any kind of organization there is always a possibility for some kind of operations to be performed recursively, almost all day. The DBMS has an intuitive ability to take note of such operations and makes itself prioritize such actions to be executed as quickly as possible. This helps the organizations to save their time on such redundant operations. For example, there is a need for any shopping market to back up their daily sales report. The DBMS tunes it accordingly and prioritizes this operation to be run immediately whenever required. In addition to this, DBMS also provides tools that point out the frequently performed operations to the administrators and then they can customize those operations according to their needs. (Hansen & Hansen, 1996) Advantages of DBMS Apart from the features described above, there are several advantages associated with the DBMS that clearly justify the reasons for considering DBMS for managing organization data. The most common advantages are described below. Scalability A DBMS once installed for a particular database can be extended to support any number of databases and it allows for merging of any kind of already existing databases. For example, if any banking organization does an acquisition and merging of another bank, then there is a need to merge the customer data of the bought bank to the buying bank’s database. Such kind of scalability is completely feasible and DBMS allows for an easy integration process which may be a very complex overhead in any other form of data management. Portability The current economic explosion has led many organizations to have branches all over the world. It would be a tedious task to have a separate data management system for each of its branch. There would not be any feasible approach to determine the overall performance of the organization. With the option of a distributed database management system, DBMS offers the option of managing several branches of an organization through a single administration facility. (Hansen & Hansen, 1996) Flexibility DBMS allows the organization to customize and devise it according to their needs. It does not work on any concrete set of rules which allows a great level of flexibility and as a result, many kinds of organizations can use it according to their needs. Quick Access As mentioned before, with organized data, DBMS is considered to be one of the most powerful tools to manage data. Easy Maintenance The automated features of the software along with its additional tools allows for an easy conversion of the business requirements to workable data. This enables an organization to easily manage its data. Easy integrating features to applications DBMS provides organizations with an ability to integrate any number of external software that depends on the organization’s database. For example, any report generating software could be just integrated with the DBMS and it can access the required data from the DBMS through the use of queries and generate reports. (Kedar, 2009) Reliability With the features provided, DBMS allows the organizations to completely rely on it. It has features that provide security and avoid redundancy of data which is considered to be the biggest overhead of any other data management system. (Kedar, 2009) Conclusion The features described in the previous sections and the advantages obtained clearly explain the growing dominance of Database Management Systems in organizations. The growing demands of an organization, the abundance of information that needs to be managed and the necessity to analyze such data effectively for the betterment of the organization have clearly forced the need for a better data management systems. The features of DBMS provide all the answers to the demands of every organization and hence it can be aptly said that every enterprise that deals with large information and that desires to become a successful organization can become so only with the help of an enterprise level Database Management System. References Rob, P., Coronel, C. & Crockett, K. (2008). Database systems: design, implementation & management. UK: Cengage Learning Hoffer, J. (2009). Modern Database Management. UK: Pearson Education Kedar, S. (2009). Database Management Systems. NY:Technical Publications. Laudon, K.C. & Laudon, J.P.(2000).Management information systems: organization and technology in the networked enterprise. UK: Prentice Hall Hansen, G.W. & Hansen, J.V. (1996). Database management and design. UK: Prentice Hall. Gertz, M. & Jajodia, S.(2008). Handbook of database security: applications and trends. NY: Springer. Bertino, E. et. al. (2011). Access Control for Databases. NY: Now Publishers Edward P. et. al. (2009). Databases in the cloud: a work in progress. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on SIG-information technology education ACM. 138-143 Read More