Database management is a system to manage information that is essential to the company’s business operations. It involves storing data, distributing it to users and applications and editing it when needed and monitoring changes to the data and protecting against data corruption due to unexpected failure. It is an element of a company’s total informational infrastructure, which supports decision-making and growth for the business as well as compliance with laws like the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The first database systems were developed in the 1960s by Charles Bachman, IBM and others. They evolved into information management systems (IMS), which allowed massive amounts of data to be stored and retrieved for a variety of reasons. From calculating inventory, to supporting complex financial accounting functions and human resource functions.
A database is a collection of tables that arrange data according to a certain scheme, like one-to-many relationships. It uses primary key to identify records and permits cross-references between tables. Each table is comprised of a variety of fields, referred to as attributes, that provide information about the entities that comprise the data. Relational models, invented by E. F. “TedCodd Codd in the 1970s at IBM as a database, are the most popular database type in the present. This model is based on normalizing data to make it more user-friendly. It is also easier to update data because it does not require changing certain sections of the database.
The majority of DBMSs support a variety of databases, offering internal and external levels of organization. The internal level concerns the cost, scalability, and other operational issues, like the physical layout of the database. The external level is the representation of the database on user interfaces and applications. It could include a mix of various external views (based on the various data models) and can also include virtual tables which are generated from generic data to improve performance.