RDBMS

 

Organizations need those Management Information Systems that would give them a “competitive strength”. Simply computerizing the back office or the front office operations is no longer sufficient. The need is to handle on-line operations, mission control applications and exercise the operational and management control.  The need demands a tool to effectively handle both the transaction processing and the decision processing requirements. It also requires the capability of dealing with hundreds of users who are using, and updating a large database. The need further demands the user multiple database residing on the hardware platforms situated at different locations nearby sites and remote sites.

 

The decision making is required more in a real time environment where the decision making process, right from the problem definition to solution, needs to be handled quickly.  The business environment is distributed and decentralized requiring real time resource (hardware, software, data, information) sharing with a compiled data flow. All this demands the RDBMS which can serve both the decision support and the transaction processing requirements.

 

The latest RDBMS systems have to sub-systems or parts. One deals with data management and transaction processing which is independent of its applications in the information processing. The second part provides a set of tools for developing and utilizing on-line applications for the decision support. This is handled by the Client-Server architecture which separates the data management functions from its application. The data management function is handled by the server and the applications are handled by the client.  The server centrally enforces all integrity, security and autonomy rules and the Client (User) makes use of the database over the networks of heterogeneous hardware.

 

The latest trend in the Information Technology is to make the end user computing simple, easy to understand and easy to use. The concept is extended to the system analyst and programmers, where the RDBMS provides the tools, saving development and processing time. It allows the business rules of the organization, standard transactions and queries to be programmed once and makes them available to all the users and developers as a stored procedure in the Data Dictionary.

 

The user does not have to change the development made on other platforms, i.e. the RDBMS can interact with the other RDBMS, or call the data from a Personal Computer based Lotus application or can user the programme written in the other language such as C, FORTRAN, COBOL, etc.  With these facilities of the modern RDBMS over the traditional DBMS, the information processing through put and the resultant performance is considerably enhanced.

 

The RDBMS allows an on-line maintenance, rapid recovery and software-based fault tolerance. These features ensure the availability of the database round the clock as the database maintenance is possible on-line when the system is in use. The maintenance activity consists of the following tasks:

 

• Backup
• Diagnostics
• Integrity
• Recovery
• Design changes
• Performance tuning

 

The modern RDBMS, unlike the traditional DBMS, handles the distributed heterogeneous data sources, software environments and hardware platforms. The system is open RDBMS. The modern business enterprises operate through multiple locations having a specific or a general business activity using the multiple hardware-software platforms. Such a business enterprise has multiple databases residing at various locations.  The information needs call for the unification and coordination of these databases. The data would get updated in the distributed locations while its use could be at other locations.