Systems Management

Archive for the ‘Database Systems’ Category

Managing your database system needs crucial planning for greater business productivity. Information and record keeping in any business or organization is a very valuable factor in achieving goals for lifelong success. Handling your business files and other data for further growth and development of your business requires productive tools or software application programs that will tidy up everything and organize files and information in any way you want them to be to suit your preferences and special needs to make your organization or business become more productive.

Database Types and Characteristics

Database management systems in every company or organization are usually identified as either desktop database systems or server databases. These two types of systems are used according to the organization’s preferences and the volume of work or information it handles. If you are working alone in running your small business, you may opt for a desktop database system in dealing with all the information and records that your small business hold for your clients and for the entire business itself.

Bigger organizations or companies usually opt for larger databases system that will meet all their huge demands of information processing systems and bulk work that is generally catered by the server databases. Server databases are obviously more powerful than desktop databases. They are also more expensive than the desktop databases.

Choosing Your Own Database Management System

Your small business may eventually grow into a bigger one or may even develop into a huge company or corporation in the future. However, these foreseen growth and development will not just happen in a mouse click or a wink of an eye. This process needs hard work and proper management to flourish each day.

If you will have to examine your business development standards, you will actually realize that you have progressed from a one-man entrepreneur that slowly takes about 3-5 staff or employees after a year or two then expands to about 20 people or more in your workplace. Of course, you will not just calculate your employee fees here and other overhead expenses in deciding for your ideal database management system. Obviously, you could not deny the fact that your business is expanding so you need a more formal workplace or office space or even a small building that will meet your needs as a team or a stand-alone business body.

Considering these facts and changes, you now have to think of an ideal database system to manage information within your business. The good thing here is you still have the choice to use desktop database systems if you are thinking about your budget. However, since your business is growing and your human resources are noticeably increasing, it is even more recommended that you switch to server databases. This involves more money to set up such a system yet more rewarding when you become stable in dealing with it for greater productivity.

Evaluating Database Systems

Once you know what you actually need with your business information systems, your final step is to evaluate various options for success. Microsoft Access is a very popular desktop database system used by small businesses. This database application is very much affordable and simple in functionalities. Other desktop database applications that some users promote are FileMaker Pro, Lotus, Paradox and FoxPro.

For server databases, the popular options are IBM DB-2, Microsoft SQL server and Oracle. Server databases maybe costly yet offer the great advantage of providing detailed design and solution for a systematic collaboration and enhanced productivity.

It does not matter how big or small your business is by now. What actually matters is how well you manage your business through a well-planned database system and design for endless success in each coming year. Do your research very well and consider your own company’s needs to get your ideal database management solution for further success.

A database is a collection of interrelated data’s stored in a database server; these data’s will be stored in the form of tables. The primary aim of database is to provide a way to store and retrieve database information in fast and efficient manner.

There are number of characteristics that differs from traditional file management system. In file system approach, each user defines and implements the needed files for a specific application to run. For example in sales department of an enterprise, One user will be maintaining the details of how many sales personnel are there in the sales department and their grades, these details will be stored and maintained in a separate file.

Another user will be maintaining the salesperson salary details working in the concern, the detailed salary report will be stored and maintained in a separate file. Although both of the users are interested in the data’s of the salespersons they will be having their details in a separate files and they need different programs to manipulate their files. This will lead to wastage of space and redundancy or replication of data’s, which may lead to confusion, sharing of data among various users is not possible, data inconsistency may occur. These files will not be having any inter-relationship among the data’s stored in these files. Therefore in traditional file processing every user will be defining their own constraints and implement the files needed for the applications.



In database approach, a single repository of data is maintained that is defined once and then accessed by many users. The fundamental characteristic of database approach is that the database system not only contains data’s but it contains complete definition or description of the database structure and constraints. These definitions are stored in a system catalog, which contains the information about the structure and definitions of the database. The information stored in the catalog is called the metadata, it describes the primary database. Hence this approach will work on any type of database for example, insurance database, Airlines, banking database, Finance details, and Enterprise information database. But in traditional file processing system the application is developed for a specific purpose and they will access specific database only.

The other main characteristic of the database is that it will allow multiple users to access the database at the same time and sharing of data is possible. The database must include concurrency control software to ensure that several users trying to update the same data at the same time, it should maintain in a controlled manner. In file system approach many programmers will be creating files over a long period and various files have different format, in various application languages.

Therefore there is possibility of information getting duplicated, this redundancy is storing same data multiple times leads to higher costs and wastage of space. This may result in data inconsistency in the application, this is because update is done to some of the files only and not all the files. Moreover in database approach multiple views can be created. View is a tailored representation of information contained in one or more tables. View is also called as “Virtual table” because view does not contain physically stored records and will not occupy any space.

A multi-user database whose users have variety of applications must provide facilities for defining multiple views. In traditional file system, if any changes are made to the structure of the files if will affect all the programs, so changes to the structure of a file may require changing of all programs that access the file. But in case of database approach the structure of the database is stored separately in the system catalog from the access of the application programs. This property is known as program-data independence.

Database can be used to provide persistent storage for program objects and data structures that resulted in object oriented database approach. Traditional systems suffered from impedance mismatch problem and difficulty in accessing the data, which is avoided in object oriented database system. Database can be used to represent complex relationships among data’s as well as to retrieve and update related data easily and efficiently.

It is possible to define and enforce integrity constraints for the data’s stored in the database. The database also provides facilities for recovering hardware and software failures. The backup and recovery subsystem is responsible for recovery. It reduces the application development time considerably when compared to the file system approach and availability of up-to-date information of all the users. It also provides security to the data’s stored in the database system.