Introduction to DBMS

DBMS stands for Database Management System. We can break it like this DBMS = Database + Management System. Database is a collection of data and Management System is a set of programs to store and retrieve those data. Based on this we can define DBMS like this: DBMS is a collection of inter-related data and set of programs to store & access those data in an easy and effective manner.

What is the need of DBMS?
Database systems are basically developed for large amount of data. When dealing with huge amount of data, there are two things that require optimization: Storage of data and retrieval of data.

Storage: According to the principles of database systems, the data is stored in such a way that it acquires lot less space as the redundant data (duplicate data) has been removed before storage. Let’s take a layman example to understand this:
In a banking system, suppose a customer is having two accounts, one is saving account and another is salary account. Let’s say bank stores saving account data at one place (these places are called tables we will learn them later) and salary account data at another place, in that case if the customer information such as customer name, address etc. are stored at both places then this is just a wastage of storage (redundancy/ duplication of data), to organize the data in a better way the information should be stored at one place and both the accounts should be linked to that information somehow. The same thing we achieve in DBMS.

Fast Retrieval of data: Along with storing the data in an optimized and systematic manner, it is also important that we retrieve the data quickly when needed. Database systems ensure that the data is retrieved as quickly as possible.

Purpose of Database Systems

The main purpose of database systems is to manage the data. Consider a university that keeps the data of students, teachers, courses, books etc. To manage this data we need to store this data somewhere where we can add new data, delete unused data, update outdated data, retrieve data, to perform these operations on data we need a Database management system that allows us to store the data in such a way so that all these operations can be performed on the data efficiently.

Database systems are much better than traditional file processing systems which we have discussed in the separate article: DBMS vs File System.