database management system

[jeehan22]

Description
A DBMS is a complex set of software programs that controls the organization, storage, management, and retrieval of data in a database. A DBMS includes:

A modeling language to define the schema of each database hosted in the DBMS, according to the DBMS data model.
The four most common types of organizations are the hierarchical, network, relational and object models. Inverted lists and other methods are also used. A given database management system may provide one or more of the four models. The optimal structure depends on the natural organization of the application's data, and on the application's requirements (which include transaction rate (speed), reliability, maintainability, scalability, and cost).
The dominant model in use today is the ad hoc one embedded in SQL, despite the objections of purists who believe this model is a corruption of the relational model, since it violates several of its fundamental principles for the sake of practicality and performance. Many DBMSs also support the Open Database Connectivity API that supports a standard way for programmers to access the DBMS.
Data structures (fields, records, files and objects) optimized to deal with very large amounts of data stored on a permanent data storage device (which implies relatively slow access compared to volatile main memory).
A database query language and report writer to allow users to interactively interrogate the database, analyze its data and update it according to the users privileges on data.
It also controls the security of the database.
Data security prevents unauthorized users from viewing or updating the database. Using passwords, users are allowed access to the entire database or subsets of it called subschemas. For example, an employee database can contain all the data about an individual employee, but one group of users may be authorized to view only payroll data, while others are allowed access to only work history and medical data.
If the DBMS provides a way to interactively enter and update the database, as well as interrogate it, this capability allows for managing personal databases. However, it may not leave an audit trail of actions or provide the kinds of controls necessary in a multi-user organization. These controls are only available when a set of application programs are customized for each data entry and updating function.
A transaction mechanism, that ideally would guarantee the ACID properties, in order to ensure data integrity, despite concurrent user accesses (concurrency control), and faults (fault tolerance).
It also maintains the integrity of the data in the database.
The DBMS can maintain the integrity of the database by not allowing more than one user to update the same record at the same time. The DBMS can help prevent duplicate records via unique index constraints; for example, no two customers with the same customer numbers (key fields) can be entered into the database. See ACID properties for more information (Redundancy avoidance).
The DBMS accepts requests for data from the application program and instructs the operating system to transfer the appropriate data.

When a DBMS is used, information systems can be changed much more easily as the organization's information requirements change. New categories of data can be added to the database without disruption to the existing system.

Organizations may use one kind of DBMS for daily transaction processing and then move the detail onto another computer that uses another DBMS better suited for random inquiries and analysis. Overall systems design decisions are performed by data administrators and systems analysts. Detailed database design is performed by database administrators.

Database servers are specially designed computers that hold the actual databases and run only the DBMS and related software. Database servers are usually multiprocessor computers, with RAID disk arrays used for stable storage. Connected to one or more servers via a high-speed channel, hardware database accelerators are also used in large volume transaction processing environments.

DBMS's are found at the heart of most database applications. Sometimes DBMSs are built around a private multitasking kernel with built-in networking support although nowadays these functions are left to the operating system.

Features and Abilities Of DBMS
One can characterize a DBMS as an "attribute management system" where attributes are small chunks of information that describe something. For example, "color" is an attribute of a car. The value of the attribute may be a color such as "red", "blue", "silver", etc. Lately databases have been modified to accept large or unstructured (pre-digested or pre-categorized) information as well, such as images and text documents. However, the main focus is still on descriptive attributes.

DBMS roll together frequently-needed services or features of attribute management. This allows one to get powerful functionality "out of the box" rather than program each from scratch or add and integrate them incrementally. Such features include