Chapter 3, Problem 1LO

Program Plan Intro

The definition of general data management concepts and term.

Advantages of the database approach to data management.

Explanation of Solution

Data management or database management consists of group of programs and procedure that manipulate database and provide an interface between the database and its uses and other application program. Data management helps in organising the raw facts of the data into useful information. General concepts and terms used while data management are described as follows:

Organisation of data

The first and foremost concept to data management is data organization. Generally, data is organised in a hierarchy which starts with the smallest piece of data used by computer and progress through the hierarchy to database. The hierarchy of data is described as follows:

  

A bit represents the state of circuit in either ON or OFF. Bits are organized in groups to generate byte. Generally, 8 bits are bundled together to represent a byte. A byte is used to represent a character. A character can be uppercase alphabet or lower-case alphabet or numerals or special characters. Field is typically a name, number or combination of characters that is used to describe the aspect of business object. Multiple fields are stored in the form of records and collection of these records is a file. A database contains multiple related files. Thus, database sits at the top of the hierarchical organisation of data.

Terms used while data management

Some of the most common and basic terms which are used while data management are entities, attributes and keys.

An entity in a database defines a person, place or thing for which data is collected, stored and maintained. For instance, in a university database, employee entity will be used to store information related to all the persons which forms the staff of the university.

Attributes are the description of the entity’s characteristics. For instance, the above-mentioned employee entity can have following attributes such as employeeID, name, gender, date of birth, date of joining, designation etc.

Keys are the one or more attributes of an entity which uniquely identifies each record in an entity. For instance, in case of entity employee to identify its different instances employeeID can be used as a key.

In recent times, most of the organisation use database approach to data management. In the database approach a common pool of database is maintained which is shared with in the organisation. There are many advantages of the database approach to data management which are described as follows:

• Database helps keep all data together at a single place, so it becomes easy to manage accessibility and control security.
• Databases can also be used to gain relational data among all the available entry in the database. This helps to manage and eliminate duplicate data from the system.
• Database helps to improve and check data quality, resulting in efficient data management, and effective control over data available in the database.