Chapter 1:

Introduction
Outline

 The Need for Databases

 Data Models
 Relational Databases
 Database Design
 Storage Manager
 Query Processing
 Transaction Manager
Database Management System (DBMS)
 DBMS contains information about a particular enterprise
 Collection of interrelated data
 Set of programs to access the data
 An environment that is both convenient and efficient to use
 Database Applications:
 Banking: transactions
 Airlines: reservations, schedules
 Universities: registration, grades
 Sales: customers, products, purchases
 Online retailers: order tracking, customized recommendations
 Manufacturing: production, inventory, orders, supply chain
 Human resources: employee records, salaries, tax deductions
 Databases can be very large.
 Databases touch all aspects of our lives
 University Database Example
 Application program examples
 Add new students, instructors, and courses
 Register students for courses, and generate class rosters
 Assign grades to students, compute grade point averages (GPA)
and generate transcripts
 In the early days, database applications were built directly
on top of file systems
Drawbacks of using file systems to store data

 Data redundancy and inconsistency

 Multiple file formats, duplication of information in different files
 Difficulty in accessing data
 Need to write a new program to carry out each new task
 Data isolation
 Multiple files and formats
 Integrity problems
 Integrity constraints (e.g., account balance > 0) become “buried” in
program code rather than being stated explicitly
 Hard to add new constraints or change existing ones
 Drawbacks of using file systems to store data (Cont.)

 Atomicity of updates
 Failures may leave database in an inconsistent state with partial updates
carried out
 Example: Transfer of funds from one account to another should either
complete or not happen at all
 Concurrent access by multiple users
 Concurrent access needed for performance
 Uncontrolled concurrent accesses can lead to inconsistencies
 Example: Two people reading a balance (say 100) and updating it by
withdrawing money (say 50 each) at the same time
 Security problems
 Hard to provide user access to some, but not all, data

Database systems offer solutions to all the above problems

Levels of Abstraction
 Physical level: describes how a record (e.g., instructor) is stored.
 Logical level: describes data stored in database, and the relationships
among the data.
type instructor = record
ID : string;
name : string;
dept_name : string;
salary : integer;
end;

 View level: application programs hide details of data types. Views

can also hide information (such as an employee’s salary) for security
purposes.
 View of Data

An architecture for a database system

Instances and Schemas
 Similar to types and variables in programming languages
 Logical Schema – the overall logical structure of the database
 Example: The database consists of information about a set of customers and
accounts in a bank and the relationship between them
 Analogous to type information of a variable in a program
 Physical schema–
schema the overall physical structure of the database
 Instance – the actual content of the database at a particular point in
time
 Analogous to the value of a variable
 Physical Data Independence – the ability to modify the physical schema
without changing the logical schema
 Applications depend on the logical schema
 In general, the interfaces between the various levels and components should
be well defined so that changes in some parts do not seriously influence
others.
Data Models
 A collection of tools for describing
 Data
 Data relationships
 Data semantics
 Data constraints
 Relational model
 Entity-Relationship data model (mainly for database design)
 Object-based data models (Object-oriented and Object-relational)
 Semistructured data model (XML)
 Other older models:
 Network model
 Hierarchical model
Relational Model
 All the data is stored in various tables.
 Example of tabular data in the relational model
Columns

Rows
A Sample Relational Database
Data Definition Language (DDL)
 Specification notation for defining the database schema
Example: create table instructor (
ID char(5),
name varchar(20),
dept_name varchar(20),
salary numeric(8,2))
 DDL compiler generates a set of table templates stored in a data
dictionary
 Data dictionary contains metadata (i.e., data about data)
 Database schema
 Integrity constraints
 Primary key (ID uniquely identifies instructors)
 Authorization
 Who can access what
 Data Manipulation Language (DML)
 Language for accessing and manipulating the data organized
by the appropriate data model
 DML also known as query language
 Two classes of languages
 Pure – used for proving properties about computational power
and for optimization
 Relational Algebra
 Tuple relational calculus
 Domain relational calculus
 Commercial – used in commercial systems
 SQL is the most widely used commercial language
 SQL

 The most widely used commercial language

 SQL is NOT a Turing machine equivalent language
 SQL is NOT a Turing machine equivalent language
 To be able to compute complex functions SQL is usually
embedded in some higher-level language
 Application programs generally access databases through one of
 Language extensions to allow embedded SQL
 Application program interface (e.g., ODBC/JDBC) which allow SQL
queries to be sent to a database
 Database Design
The process of designing the general structure of the database:

 Logical Design – Deciding on the database schema.

Database design requires that we find a “good” collection
of relation schemas.
 Business decision – What attributes should we record in the
database?
 Computer Science decision – What relation schemas should
we have and how should the attributes be distributed among
the various relation schemas?
 Physical Design – Deciding on the physical layout of the
database
Database Design (Cont.)
 Is there any problem with this relation?
 Design Approaches
 Need to come up with a methodology to ensure that each of the
relations in the database is “good”
 Two ways of doing so:
 Entity Relationship Model (Chapter 7)
 Models an enterprise as a collection of entities and relationships
 Represented diagrammatically by an entity-relationship diagram:
 Normalization Theory (Chapter 8)
 Formalize what designs are bad, and test for them
Object-Relational Data Models
 Relational model: flat, “atomic” values
 Object Relational Data Models
 Extend the relational data model by including object orientation and
constructs to deal with added data types.
 Allow attributes of tuples to have complex types, including non-atomic
values such as nested relations.
 Preserve relational foundations, in particular the declarative access to
data, while extending modeling power.
 Provide upward compatibility with existing relational languages.
 XML: Extensible Markup Language
 Defined by the WWW Consortium (W3C)
 Originally intended as a document markup language not a
database language
 The ability to specify new tags, and to create nested tag
structures made XML a great way to exchange data, not just
documents
 XML has become the basis for all new generation data
interchange formats.
 A wide variety of tools is available for parsing, browsing and
querying XML documents/data
 Database Engine
 Storage manager
 Query processing
 Transaction manager
Storage Management
 Storage manager is a program module that provides the interface
between the low-level data stored in the database and the
application programs and queries submitted to the system.
 The storage manager is responsible to the following tasks:
 Interaction with the OS file manager
 Efficient storing, retrieving and updating of data
 Issues:
 Storage access
 File organization
 Indexing and hashing
 Query Processing
1. Parsing and translation
2. Optimization
3. Evaluation
 Query Processing (Cont.)
 Alternative ways of evaluating a given query
 Equivalent expressions
 Different algorithms for each operation
 Cost difference between a good and a bad way of evaluating a
query can be enormous
 Need to estimate the cost of operations
 Depends critically on statistical information about relations which
the database must maintain
 Need to estimate statistics for intermediate results to compute cost
of complex expressions
 Transaction Management
 What if the system fails?
 What if more than one user is concurrently updating the same
data?
 A transaction is a collection of operations that performs a
single logical function in a database application
 Transaction-management component ensures that the
database remains in a consistent (correct) state despite system
failures (e.g., power failures and operating system crashes)
and transaction failures.
 Concurrency-control manager controls the interaction among
the concurrent transactions, to ensure the consistency of the
database.
Database Users and Administrators

Database
Database System Internals
Database Architecture

The architecture of a database systems is greatly influenced by

the underlying computer system on which the database is running:
 Centralized
 Client-server
 Parallel (multi-processor)
 Distributed
History of Database Systems
 1950s and early 1960s:
 Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
 Tapes provided only sequential access
 Punched cards for input
 Late 1960s and 1970s:
 Hard disks allowed direct access to data
 Network and hierarchical data models in widespread use
 Ted Codd defines the relational data model
 Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
 IBM Research begins System R prototype
 UC Berkeley begins Ingres prototype
 High-performance (for the era) transaction processing
History (cont.)
 1980s:
 Research relational prototypes evolve into commercial systems
 SQL becomes industrial standard
 Parallel and distributed database systems
 Object-oriented database systems
 1990s:
 Large decision support and data-mining applications
 Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
 Emergence of Web commerce
 Early 2000s:
 XML and XQuery standards
 Automated database administration
 Later 2000s:
 Giant data storage systems
 Google BigTable, Yahoo PNuts, Amazon, ..