Overview

Data is nothing but facts and statistics stored or free flowing over a network, generally it's raw and unprocessed.

Data becomes data once it's processed, turning it into something meaningful.

Example- once you visit any web site, they may store you information science address, that's knowledge, reciprocally they may add a cookie in your browser, marking you that you just visited

The website, that is data, your name, your age that is all data.

Database is associate degree organized assortment of knowledge, usually keep and accessed electronically from an automatic data processing system.

It can be easily accessed, managed and updated.

Database are often software system primarily based or hardware based, with one sole purpose, storing knowledge.

Before introduce DBMS, data was collected and stored in tapes, which were mostly write only, which means once data is stored on it, it can never be read again. They were slow and bulky, and soon computer scientists realized that they needed a better solution of this problem.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle was amongst the first few, who realized the need for a software based Database Management System.

What is DBMS?

A DBMS is a software that allows creation, definition and manipulation of database, allowing users to store, process and analyze data easily. DBMS provides us with an interface or a tool, to perform various operations like creating database, storing data in it, updating data, creating tables in the database and a lot more.

DBMS also provides protection and security to the databases. It also maintains data consistency in case of multiple users.

Here are some examples of popular DBMS used these days:

• MySQL
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• IBM DB2
• PostgreSQL
• Amazon Simple DB (cloud based) etc.

Characteristics of Database Management System

A database management system has following characteristics:

1. Data stored into Tables: Data is never directly stored into the database. Data is hold on into tables, created inside the database. DBMS additionally permits to possess relationships between tables that makes the info additional meaning and connected. You can simply perceive what kind of information is hold on wherever by viewing all the tables created in an exceedingly information.
2. Less Redundancy: In the modern world hard drives are very cheap, but earlier when hard drives were too expensive, unnecessary repetition of data in database was a big problem. But DBMS follows Normalization which divides the data in such a way that repetition is minimum.
3. Data Consistency: On Live data, i.e. data that is being continuously updated and added, maintaining the consistency of data can become a challenge. But DBMS handles it all by itself.
4. Support multiple user and Concurrent Access: DBMS allows multiple users to work on it (update, insert, and delete data) at the same time and still manages to maintain the data consistency.
5. Query Language: DBMS provides users with a simple Query language, using which data can be easily fetched, inserted, deleted and updated in a database.
6. Security: The DBMS also takes care of the security of data, protecting the data from un-authorized access. In a typical software package, we will produce user accounts with totally different access permissions, exploitation that we will simply secure our information by proscribing user access.
7. Transaction: It supports transactions, which allows us to better handle and manage data integrity in real world applications where multi-threading is extensively used.