Database Management System and Everything You Need To Know

Database management system (DBMS) refers to any software that handles the storage, updates and recoupment of data. As of November 2022, the most popular DBMS software is Oracle, with MYSQL following up closely and Microsoft SQL server as the third most used software. DBMS software uses a B-Tree data structure to store indexes and henceforth, improves the performance of the entire database. DBMS uses various queries according to requirements with similar but not the same syntaxes to store, rename, update, and modify data. DBMSs use two types of language to process the following commands which are DDL and DML (Data Defining Language and Data Manipulation Language).

DDL is generally used to create various tables, indexes, schemas, sequences, locations and aliases in a database. These are done through predefined commands in the software systems. Some examples of DDLs are “CREATE”, “DROP”, “TRUNCATE”, and “RENAME”.

DML is generally used to manipulate data in the database, they are used to either insert, delete or update data that is created by DDL and stored. Some common examples are “INSERT”, “DELETE”, “SELECT” and “UPDATE”.

Let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of DBMS to get a clear idea of what they are capable of doing.

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Advantages of DBMS

There are numerous advantages of DBMS software to manage data and how versatile they are, let’s try to shine some light on the most key-role playing ones.

1) Data safety and Data sharing

DBMS software provides excellent encryption and secure sharing of data. An organization can give various types of access to their personnel and can also filter who can access data and what kind of access is granted. With selective access data won’t be modified unnecessarily and also has a long record of who makes what changes.

2) Data Consistency

With DBMS software, data is altered within and is in the most consistent form with reliable data sources through an interconnected web of the organization’s personnel. Data inconsistency occurs when different members of the team use various sources to manage data but through DBMS all the issues can be sorted out.

3) Data Integration

With the right DBMS, data redundancy can be reduced and custom data can be stored effectively and include flexible integration between various databases in a database file, unlike the manual file systems that were used in the previous days.

Disadvantages of DBMS

There may be a few disadvantages that need to be cared for when using a DBMS.

1) Data Loss

Multiple people using the same database at once can result in data loss and constant entries would be registering at every given moment resulting in overwriting of data.

2) Hardware and Software limitations

Since it is such a high-level language involving various processes and workloads, to process all of this you may need certain hardware and software upgrades for the system to not crash every time you try to use it.

3) Storage issues

DBMS are offered exclusive software that is specially used for storage purpose tasks. The software can take up a lot of storage and you may need an upgrade on storage for that.

Conclusion – Database Management System

Now that we have studied the basics and pros and cons of DBMS software, we can officially conclude that DBMS software is indeed very useful and have a vast list of advantages and very few disadvantages which in fact can be covered with just an upgrade, it is highly recommended that DBMS should be used for data management and organization.