Chapter 1: Introduction

Database System Concepts, 6th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Outline
 The Need for Databases
 Data Models
 Relational Databases
 Database Design
 Storage Manager
 Query Processing
 Transaction Manager

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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
 This typical file-processing system is supported by a
conventional operating system.
 The system stores permanent records in various files, and it
needs different application programs to extract records from,
and add records to, the appropriate files.

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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
 The data values stored in the database must satisfy certain types
of consistency constraints
 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

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

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 View of Data
 A database system is a collection of interrelated data and a set
of programs that allow users to access and modify these data.

 A major purpose of a database system is to provide users with

an abstract view of the data. That is, the system hides certain
details of how the data are stored and maintained.

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Levels of Abstraction
 Physical level: describes how a data (e.g., instructor) is stored. It
describes complex low-level data structures in detail.
 Logical level: describes what 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. The highest level of abstraction describes only part of the
entire database.

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 View of Data

An architecture for a database system

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 Instances and Schemas
 Databases change over time as information is inserted and
deleted.
 The collection of information stored in the database at a particular
moment is called an instance of the database.
 The overall design of the database is called the database schema.

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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– 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.

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Data Models
 A collection of tools for describing
 Data
 Data relationships
 Data semantics
 Data constraints
 Relational model:
 uses a collection of tables to represent both data and the relationships
among those data.
 Each table has multiple columns, and each column has a unique name.
 Tables are also known as relations.
 Entity-Relationship data model (mainly for database design)
 uses a collection of basic objects, called entities, and relationships among
these objects.
 Object-based data models (Object-oriented and Object-relational)
 Semistructured data model (XML)
 Other older models:
 Network model
 Hierarchical model
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 Relational Model
 All the data is stored in various tables.
 Example of tabular data in the relational model Columns

Rows

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 A Sample Relational Database

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 Database Languages

A database system provides a data-definition language

to specify the database schema and a data-manipulation
language to express database queries and updates

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 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
 Data storage and definition language (defines storage structure and
access methods through a set of statements)
 Integrity constraints (data value stored in the database must satisfy certain
constraints)
 Primary key (ID uniquely identifies instructors)
 Authorization
 Who can access what

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Data Manipulation Language (DML)
 Language for accessing and manipulating the data organized by the appropriate
data model
 DML, also known as query language
 The types of access are:
 Retrieval of information stored in the database
 Insertion of new information into the database
 Deletion of information from the database
 Modification of information stored in the database
 Two classes of languages
 Pure/Procedural – used for proving properties about computational power
and for optimization (require a user to specify what data are needed and
how to get those data)
 Relational Algebra
 Tuple relational calculus
 Domain relational calculus
 Commercial/Non-procedural – used in commercial systems (require a
user to specify what data are needed without specifying how to get those
data)
 SQL is the most widely used commercial language
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 SQL
 The most widely used commercial 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

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 A Sample Relational Database

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 Query

find the names of all instructors in the History

department
select instructor.name
from instructor
where instructor.dept name = ’History’;

find the instructor ID and department name of

all instructors associated with a department
with budget of greater than $95,000.

select instructor.ID, department.dept name

from instructor, department
where instructor.dept_name=
department.dept_name and
department.budget > 95000;
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 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

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 Database Design (Cont.)
 Is there any problem with this relation?

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 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

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 • Entity sets are represented by a rectangular box with the entity set name in
the header and the attributes listed below it.
• Relationship sets are represented by a diamond connecting a pair of related
entity sets. The name of the relationship is placed inside the diamond.

The E-R diagram indicates that there are two entity sets, instructor
and department, with attributes.
The diagram also shows a relationship member between instructor
and department.

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 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.

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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

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 Database Engine
 Storage manager
 Query processing
 Transaction manager

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 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

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 Query Processing
1. Parsing and translation
2. Optimization
3. Evaluation

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 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

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 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.

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 Database Users and Administrators

Database

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 Database System Internals

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 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

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 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

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.35 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 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, ..

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.36 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 End of Chapter 1

Database System Concepts - 6th Edition 1.37 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan