Advances in Database Technologies

(MSITec7111)
Introduction
 Database-System Applications
 Purpose of Database Systems
 View of Data
 Database Languages
 Database Design
 Database Engine
 Database Architecture
 Database Users and Administrators
 History of Database Systems
 Database Applications Examples

 Enterprise Information
• Sales: customers, products, purchases
• Accounting: payments, receipts, assets
• Human Resources: Information about employees,
salaries, payroll taxes.
 Manufacturing: management of production, inventory,
orders, supply chain.
 Banking and finance
• customer information, accounts, loans, and banking
transactions.
• Credit card transactions
• Finance: sales and purchases of financial instruments
(e.g., stocks and bonds; storing real-time market data
 Universities: registration, grades
 Database Applications Examples (Cont.)

 Airlines: reservations, schedules

 Telecommunication: records of calls, texts, and data usage,
generating monthly bills, maintaining balances on prepaid
calling cards
 Web-based services
• Online retailers: order tracking, customized
recommendations
• Online advertisements
 Document databases
 Navigation systems: For maintaining the locations of varies
places of interest along with the exact routes of roads,
train systems, buses, etc.
 Purpose of Database Systems

In the early days, database applications were built directly on

top of file systems, which leads to:

 Data redundancy and inconsistency: data is stored in

multiple file formats resulting induplication of
information in different files
 Difficulty in accessing data
• Need to write a new program to carry out each new
task
 Data isolation
• Multiple files and formats
 Integrity problems
• Integrity constraints (e.g., account balance > 0)
become “buried” in program code rather than being
stated explicitly
• Hard to add new constraints or change existing ones
 Purpose of Database Systems (Cont.)

 Atomicity of updates
• Failures may leave database in an inconsistent state
with partial updates carried out
• Example: Transfer of funds from one account to another
should either complete or not happen at all
 Concurrent access by multiple users
• Concurrent access needed for performance
• Uncontrolled concurrent accesses can lead to
inconsistencies
 Ex: Two people reading a balance (say 100) and
updating it by withdrawing money (say 50 each) at
the same time
 Security problems
• Hard to provide user access to some, but not all, data

Database systems offer solutions to all the above problems

 Data Models
 A collection of tools for describing
• Data
• Data relationships
• Data semantics
• Data constraints
 Relational model
 Entity-Relationship data model (mainly for database design)
 Object-based data models (Object-oriented and Object-
relational)
 Semi-structured data model (XML)
 Other older models:
• Network model
• Hierarchical model
 Relational Model

 All the data is stored in various tables.

 Example of tabular data in the relational model

Columns

Rows

Ted Codd
Turing Award 1981
A Sample Relational Database
 View of Data
An architecture for a database
system
 Instances and Schemas

 Similar to types and variables in programming languages

 Logical Schema – the overall logical structure of the
database
• Example: The database consists of information about a
set of customers and accounts in a bank and the
relationship between them
 Analogous to type information of a variable in a
program
 Physical schema – the overall physical structure of the
database
 Instance – the actual content of the database at a
particular point in time
• Analogous to the value of a variable
 Physical Data Independence

 Physical Data Independence – the ability to modify the

physical schema without changing the logical schema
• Applications depend on the logical schema
• In general, the interfaces between the various levels
and components should be well defined so that
changes in some parts do not seriously influence
others.
 Data Definition Language (DDL)

 Specification notation for defining the database schema

Example: create table instructor (
ID char(5),
name varchar(20),
dept_name varchar(20),
salary numeric(8,2))
 DDL compiler generates a set of table templates stored in
a data dictionary
 Data dictionary contains metadata (i.e., data about data)
• Database schema
• Integrity constraints
 Primary key (ID uniquely identifies instructors)
• Authorization
 Who can access what
 Data Manipulation Language (DML)

 Language for accessing and updating the data organized

by the appropriate data model
• DML also known as query language
 There are basically two types of data-manipulation
language
• Procedural DML -- require a user to specify what data
are needed and how to get those data.
• Declarative DML -- require a user to specify what data
are needed without specifying how to get those data.
 Declarative DMLs are usually easier to learn and use than
are procedural DMLs.
 Declarative DMLs are also referred to as non-procedural
DMLs
 The portion of a DML that involves information retrieval is
called a query language.
 SQL Query Language

 SQL query language is nonprocedural. A query takes as

input several tables (possibly only one) and always returns
a single table.
 Example to find all instructors in Comp. Sci. dept
select name
from instructor
where dept_name = 'Comp. Sci.'
 SQL is NOT a Turing machine equivalent language
 To be able to compute complex functions SQL is usually
embedded in some higher-level language
 Application programs generally access databases through
one of
• Language extensions to allow embedded SQL
• Application program interface (e.g., ODBC/JDBC) which
allow SQL queries to be sent to a database
 Database Access from Application
Program

 Non-procedural query languages such as SQL are not as

powerful as a universal Turing machine.
 SQL does not support actions such as input from users,
output to displays, or communication over the network.
 Such computations and actions must be written in a host
language, such as C/C++, Java or Python, with embedded
SQL queries that access the data in the database.
 Application programs -- are programs that are used to
interact with the database in this fashion.
 Database Design

The process of designing the general structure of the database:

 Logical Design – Deciding on the database schema.

Database design requires that we find a “good” collection
of relation schemas.
• Business decision – What attributes should we record
in the database?
• Computer Science decision – What relation schemas
should we have and how should the attributes be
distributed among the various relation schemas?
 Physical Design – Deciding on the physical layout of the
database
 Database Engine

 A database system is partitioned into modules that deal

with each of the responsibilities of the overall system.
 The functional components of a database system can be
divided into
• The storage manager,
• The query processor component,
• The transaction management component.
 Storage Manager
 A program module that provides the interface between the
low-level data stored in the database and the application
programs and queries submitted to the system.
 The storage manager is responsible to the following tasks:
• Interaction with the OS file manager
• Efficient storing, retrieving and updating of data
 The storage manager components include:
• Authorization and integrity manager
• Transaction manager
• File manager
• Buffer manager
 Storage Manager (Cont.)

 The storage manager implements several data structures

as part of the physical system implementation:
• Data files -- store the database itself
• Data dictionary -- stores metadata about the structure
of the database, in particular the schema of the
database.
• Indices -- can provide fast access to data items. A
database index provides pointers to those data items
that hold a particular value.
 Query Processor

 The query processor components include:

• DDL interpreter -- interprets DDL statements and
records the definitions in the data dictionary.
• DML compiler -- translates DML statements in a query
language into an evaluation plan consisting of low-level
instructions that the query evaluation engine
understands.
 The DML compiler performs query optimization; that
is, it picks the lowest cost evaluation plan from
among the various alternatives.
• Query evaluation engine -- executes low-level
instructions generated by the DML compiler.
 Query Processing

1. Parsing and translation

2. Optimization
3. Evaluation
 Transaction Management

 A transaction is a collection of operations that performs a

single logical function in a database application
 Transaction-management component ensures that the
database remains in a consistent (correct) state despite
system failures (e.g., power failures and operating system
crashes) and transaction failures.
 Concurrency-control manager controls the interaction
among the concurrent transactions, to ensure the
consistency of the database.
 Database Architecture

 Centralized databases
• One to a few cores, shared memory
 Client-server,
• One server machine executes work on behalf of
multiple client machines.
 Parallel databases
• Many core shared memory
• Shared disk
• Shared nothing
 Distributed databases
• Geographical distribution
• Schema/data heterogeneity
 Database Architecture
(Centralized/Shared-Memory)
 Database Applications

Database applications are usually partitioned into two or

three parts
 Two-tier architecture -- the application resides at the
client machine, where it invokes database system
functionality at the server machine
 Three-tier architecture -- the client machine acts as a
front end and does not contain any direct database calls.

• The client end communicates with an application

server, usually through a forms interface.
• The application server in turn communicates with a
database system to access data.
Two-tier and three-tier architectures
Database Users
 Database Administrator

A person who has central control over the system is called a

database administrator (DBA). Functions of a DBA include:

 Schema definition
 Storage structure and access-method definition
 Schema and physical-organization modification
 Granting of authorization for data access
 Routine maintenance
• Periodically backing up the database
• Ensuring that enough free disk space is
available for normal operations, and
upgrading disk space as required
• Monitoring jobs running on the database
 History of Database Systems

 1950s and early 1960s:

• Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
 Tapes provided only sequential access
• Punched cards for input
 Late 1960s and 1970s:
• Hard disks allowed direct access to data
• Network and hierarchical data models in widespread use
• Ted Codd defines the relational data model
 Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
 IBM Research begins System R prototype
 UC Berkeley (Michael Stonebraker) begins Ingres
prototype
 Oracle releases first commercial relational database
• High-performance (for the era) transaction processing
 History of Database Systems (Cont.)

 1980s:
• Research relational prototypes evolve into commercial
systems
 SQL becomes industrial standard
• Parallel and distributed database systems
 Wisconsin, IBM, Teradata
• Object-oriented database systems
 1990s:
• Large decision support and data-mining applications
• Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
• Emergence of Web commerce
 History of Database Systems (Cont.)

 2000s
• Big data storage systems
 Google BigTable, Yahoo PNuts, Amazon,
 “NoSQL” systems.
• Big data analysis: beyond SQL
 Map reduce and friends
 2010s
• SQL reloaded
 SQL front end to Map Reduce systems
 Massively parallel database systems
 Multi-core main-memory databases