Reference no: EM133897124

Assignment:

Introduction to Database Systems

Background

"Data is King!" This saying underlines the importance of data to many organisations. Some writers use the term 'data' to mean raw facts and figures exactly as recorded, and 'information' to mean data that has been processed to evoke its meaning. Here we focus on the data. So why is data so important?

If we consider for example a bank: over time customers will join and leave, and some staff will also come and go. But the data - in this case the balances and history of monetary transactions - carries on, growing ever larger. To put it another way, if the bank lost most of its staff, in time it could find new employees and continue; but if it lost most of its data, it would go out of business.

We can go further, and note that the bank's financial data used to be stored in physical ledgers (until the early 20th century), then over time this was moved to main frame computers, then mini computers, and it may now reside in the Cloud. So even the hardware and the software changes over time, but still the data lives on.

Of course, the primacy of data applies not only to banks, but also numerous other kinds of organisations: universities, businesses, health services, scientific research institutes, hotels, and many others .... The operation of all such enterprises depends on their data.

This explains the development of database technology, which provides efficient and robust technical solutions for the storage and management of large amounts of data.

Almost every organisation uses one or more databases to manage its data:

• The university needs to record: who the students are, who has paid fees, who has attempted/passed which modules, etc.
• Any sizeable company needs an HR database to record: who is employed, how much are they paid, have they taken holidays, etc.
• Retailers need to record: details of customers, orders, invoices, payments, stock, etc.
• All social networking sites store the interactions between members in a database. Again, for a popular site, the number of interactions could be astronomical, and they all need to be available at a second's notice when a user's page is accessed.
• There are many, many more examples; think of hospitals, airlines, medical research facilities, cinema chains, sports leagues, ... The examples are limitless.

Question text

Reflective Exercise 1.1

What activities have you undertaken in the last couple of days that depended on a database system?