Chapter 2
Outlines
Data Models, Schemas, and Instances.
Three-Schema Architecture and Data Independence.
Database Languages and Interfaces.
The Database System Environment.
Centralized and Client/Server Architectures for DBMSs.
Classification of Database Management System.
Data Models, Schemas, and Instances
Data Model is a collection of concepts that can be used to describe the structure of
database.
It Provides means to achieve data abstraction
Data Abstraction is refers to the hiding of certain details of how the data are
stored and maintained. With several levels of abstraction. There are three levels of
abstractions:
View level: The highest level of abstraction describes only part of the entire
database.
Cont’d
Logical level: This level describes what data are stored in the whole
database.
Physical level: The lowest level of abstraction describes how the
data are actually stored.
It includes the basic operations to Specify retrievals and updates on
the database.
Categories of Data Models
High-level or conceptual data models
Provide concepts that are close to the way people perceive data to present the data.
Low-level or physical data models
Describe the details of how data is stored on computer
storage media
Representational data models
Easily understood by end users
Also similar to how data organized in computer storage
The two most common conceptual models are the Entity-Relationship model and
the Object-Oriented Model.
Entity – Relationship (E/R) model is a conceptual model based on a perception of the
world based on the concept of entities, attributes and relationships.
Entity: represents a real-world object or concept; such as employee and account in a
banking system, reservation and passenger in an airline reservation system.
Attribute: describes an entity in the database; such as name and birth date for
employee; account number and balance for account; flight number and seat number
for reservation; and name and passport number for passenger.
Relationship: is an association among the entities. For example a customer entity is
related to the account entity in a banking system as the owner of the account; and
passenger entity is related to the reservation entity upon booking for reservation on
the airline reservation system.
Object – Oriented Data model
The object data model is a way for the modeling of a database in ODBMS. It can
be regard as high-level implementation data model that is closer to the conceptual
model.
It is based on the object oriented concept mainly for ODBMS
implementation but can also be used in the data model of RDBMS
implementation.
This combination object-oriented data model with the relational model leads into
a data model known as object relational data model.
Since information can be inserted to or deleted from database at
anytime, database changes over time. At a particular moment, the
collection of information stored in the database is called an instance
of the database.
Data independence
Data Independence is the ability to modify the schema in one level without
affecting the schema in the higher level.
There are two levels of data independence:
Logical data independence is the ability to make change in the conceptual
schema without causing a modify in the user views or application program.
Physical data independence is the ability to make change in the internal
schema without causing a modify in the conceptual schema or application program.
DBMS interfaces
A database management system (DBMS) interface is a user interface which
allows for the ability to input queries to a database without using the query
language itself. There are many interfaces for DBMS.
Menu-based interfaces for web clients or browsing.
Forms – based interfaces.
Graphical User Interfaces.
Natural – language interfaces.
Speech input and output.
Interfaces for DBA.
Database system utilities.
In addition to possessing the software modules just described, most DBMSs have database
utilities that help the DBA manage the database system. Common utilities have the following
types of functions:
Loading: load existing data files
Back up: Creates a backup copy of the database.
Database storage reorganization: Reorganize a set of database files into different file
organizations.
Performance monitoring: Monitors database usage and provides statistics to the
DBA.
Centralized and client/server
Architecture for DBMS
Centralized DBMS architecture.
All DBMS functionality, application program execution, and user interface
processing carried out on one machine.