What is Database Management System?

In this article, you will learn about database management systems (DBMS), Types of DBMS, and their examples.

What is a database?

A database is an organized collection of structured data. Usually, data is organized in single or multiple interconnected tables this makes it easy to store and fetch relevant information.

The main purpose of using a database is to operate a larger amount of data by storing, managing, and retrieving it.

What is a database management system?

The database management system is software that provides an interface between a user and a database. It helps to easily create & access database, manipulates data, report, and represent data from a database. DBMS also handles tasks such as database security, backup, update, and multiuser access.

A DBMS is used for the following –

Define data – create modify and delete data
Update data – with the provide command you can update existing data of a database
Retrieve data – authorize a user and provide access to data
Administration of users and database – It can be used to register a new user or remove an existing one, monitors performance and deals with concurrency control.

Examples of a database management system

Some of the most popular database management softwares are –

MySQL
Oracle database
Microsoft SQL server
PostgreSQL
MariaDB
IBM DB2
SQLite
dBASE
Microsoft Access

Types of DBMS

Hierarchical DBMS – In this type of database management system, the data is organized in a tree-like structure. It is more like a child and parent relationship. A parent can have many children but a child will have only one parent.

Relational DBMS – This type is the most widely used database model. It stores data in tables that may be interrelated to each other. Structured Query Language is used to manipulate this type of database.

Network DBMS – This type of database management system supports many to many relationships where multiple user records can be linked. In this entities are organized in graphs and can be accessed through different paths.

Object-oriented DBMS – An object-oriented database is a database where data is stored in the form of objects, as in object-oriented programming. Software that is used to manage this kind of database is known as object-oriented DBMS.

Advantages of DBMS

A few advantages of DBMS are –

It provides various ways to store and retrieve data
It provides data integrity and security with minimum data duplicity and redundancy
Facilitate multiple applications to use the same data this can reduce the application development time
It has an automatic backup and recovery system
Facilitates the authorization facility to authenticates users and provide them access to the data
It provides uniform administration procedures for data