3-Level Abstraction of
Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
Database Management 3-Level Abstraction of
Database
System 3 Mapping and Data
Independence
Database Users
3-Level Abstraction of Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
School of Computer Engineering,
KIIT University
3.1
3-Level Abstraction of
3-Level Abstraction of Database Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
3-Level Abstraction of Database
The goal of the ANSI/SPARC 3-level abstraction is to separate 3-Level Abstraction of
the user applications and the physical database. It deals with Database
Mapping and Data
the data, the relationship between them and the different Independence
access methods implemented on the database. The logical Database Users
design of a database is called a schema
3.2
3-Level Abstraction of
3-Level Abstraction of Database... Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
External/View Level 3-Level Abstraction of
Database
The external level includes a number of external schemas or Mapping and Data
Independence
user views. Each external schema or user view describes the Database Users
part of the database that a particular user group is interested in
and hides the details of the database from that user group
Conceptual Level
The conceptual level has a conceptual schema, which
describes the structure of the whole database for a community
of users. The conceptual schema hides the details of physical
storage structures and concentrates on describing entities,
data types, relationships and constraints
It represents global view of the entire database. Thus; for a
database, there is only one conceptual schema available
3.3
3-Level Abstraction of
3-Level Abstraction of Database... Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
3-Level Abstraction of
Database
Mapping and Data
Independence
Database Users
Internal Level
The internal level has an internal schema, which describes the
physical storage structure of the database system. Like
conceptual schema, there is only one internal schema available
for a database. It is the one which is closest to physical storage
The internal schema not only defines the various stored record
types, but also specifies what indices exist, how stored fields
are represented
3.4
3-Level Abstraction of
Mapping and Data Independence Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
Mapping and Data Independence
3-Level Abstraction of
In a database system based on the 3-level architecture, each Database
user group refers only to its own external schema. The process Mapping and Data
Independence
of transforming requests and results between different levels Database Users
are called mapping
Conceptual/Internal Mapping
It defines the correspondence between the conceptual view
and the stored database. Physical Data Independence
indicates that the internal schema can be changed without any
change to the conceptual schema
External/Conceptual Mapping
It defines the correspondence between a particular external
view and the conceptual view. Logical Data Independence
indicates that the conceptual schema can be changed without
affecting the existing external schemas
3.5
3-Level Abstraction of
Database Users Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
3-Level Abstraction of
Database
Different database users are: Mapping and Data
Independence
Naive Users Database Users
They are the normal or unsophisticated users who interact with
the system by invoking application programs that have been
written previously. The typical user interface for naive users is a
form interface, where the user can fill in appropriate fields of
the form
Application Programmers
They are computer professionals who write application
programs to access data from the database. Application
programmers can use different tools to develop user interfaces
3.6
3-Level Abstraction of
Database Users... Database
Chittaranjan Pradhan
Sophisticated Users
3-Level Abstraction of
Database
They interact with the system without creating any application Mapping and Data
Independence
program. Rather, they form their requests in a database query
Database Users
language and submit each such query to a query processor.
Analysts who submit queries to explore data in the database
fall in this category
Specialized Users
They are sophisticated users who write specialized database
applications that don’t fit into the traditional data processing
framework
Database Administrator(DBA)
The person who has central control of the whole database
system is called DBA. The DBA coordinates all the activities of
the database system
3.7
3-Level Abstraction of
Database Users... Database
The roles of DBA are: Chittaranjan Pradhan
• DBA creates the original database schema by executing a
set of DDL statements 3-Level Abstraction of
Database
• DBA defines and controls the access methods for the Mapping and Data
Independence
different users Database Users
• DBA carries out changes to the schema and physical
organization to reflect the changing needs of the
organization, or to alter the physical organization to
improve performance
• By granting different types of authorization, DBA can
regulate which parts of the database various users can
access
• DBA specifies the different types of constraints to different
tables or objects
• DBA is responsible for the periodically backing up the
database
• DBA ensures that enough free disk space is available for
normal operations and upgrading disk space as required
• DBA monitors the jobs running on the database and
ensures that the performance is not degraded by very
expensive tasks submitted by some users 3.8
