What is a Database Management System?

Written by Indicative Team

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Database Management System Defined

A database management system (DBMS) is a system software for creating and managing databases. 

The role of DBMS includes data definition, data retrieval and user administration: 

  • Data definition is the creation, modification and removal of definitions that define the organization of data in a database. 
  • Data retrieval is the retrieval of data from the database which can be used by applications for various purposes. 
  • User administration includes the enforcing of data security, through monitoring performance, maintaining data integrity, dealing with concurrency control and recovering information corrupted by unexpected failure. It also includes the registering and monitoring of users. 

A DBMS manages three elements; the physical database, the database engine, and the database schema. 

  • The physical database is a collection of files that contain data. 
  • The database engine is the software that allows data to be accessed, modified and locked. 
  • The database schema is the specification of the logical structure in the database. 

These three elements provide security, data integrity, concurrency and uniformed data administration procedure. 

DBMS supports administration tasks such as backup and recovery, change management and performance monitoring. They are also responsible for restarts, rollback, recovery, as well as auditing activity database activity.  

Some DBMS currently available are:

  • Oracle RDBMS
  • IBM DB2
  • Altibase
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • SAP Sybase ASE
  • Teradata
  • ADABAS
  • MySQL
  • FileMaker
  • Microsoft Access

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