Database management is the method to manage information that is essential to the organization’s business processes. It involves storing data, distributing it to users and applications and editing it as required and monitoring changes to the data and preventing data corruption due to unexpected failure. It is a component of the entire informational infrastructure of a company which supports decision-making and corporate growth as well as compliance with laws such as the GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act.
In the 1960s, Charles Bachman and IBM among others came up with the first database systems. They evolved into information management systems (IMS), which allowed large amounts of data to be stored and retrieved for a variety of purposes. From calculating inventory, to supporting complex financial accounting functions and human resource functions.
A database consists of tables that are organized according to a particular arrangement, like one-to-many relationships. It uses primary key to identify records and allow cross-references among tables. Each table has a set of fields called attributes which provide information about data entities. The most popular type of database currently is a relational model created by E. F. “Ted” Codd at IBM in the 1970s. This model is based on normalizing the data, making it more easy to use. It also makes it simpler to update data, avoiding the need to update several databases.
Most DBMSs are able to support different types of databases and offer different internal and external levels of organization. The internal level is focused on the cost, scalability, and other operational issues, such as the physical layout of the database. The external level focuses on how the database appears in user interfaces and other applications. It can include a combination of different external views (based on the various data models) and may include virtual tables which are generated from generic data in order to improve performance.