DATA: THE NEW CORPORATE RESOURCE - Fundamentals of Database Management Systems - page 4

achieve high degrees of scalability and availability, the
system is organized around the concept of distributed
databases, including replicated data that is updated
simultaneously at several domestic and international
locations. The system is integrated with the Oracle Finan-
cials enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and the
transactional data is shared with the company's account-
ing and finance functions. In addition, Amazon.com
has built a multiterabyte data warehouse that imports its
transactional data and creates a decision support system
with a menu-based facility system of its own design.

Programs utilizing the data warehouse send personally
targeted promotional mailers to the company's customers.
Amazon.com's database includes hundreds of
individual tables. Among these are catalog tables listing
its millions of individual books and other products,
acustomer table with millions of records, personalization
tables, promotional tables, shopping-cart tables that
handle the actual purchase transactions, and order-history
tables. An order processing subsystem that determines
which fulfillment center to ship goods from uses tables that
keep track of product inventory levels in these centers.

held in Room 830 of Alumni Hall. In a commercial environment, it may be the fact
that employee John Baker's employee number is 137; or it may be the fact that one
of a company's suppliers, the Superior Products Co., is located in Chicago; or it
may be the fact that the refrigerator with serial number 958304 was manufactured
on November 5, 2004.
Actually, people have been interested in data for at least the past 12,000 years.
While today we often associate the concept of data with the computer, historically
there have been many more primitive methods of data storage and handling.
In the ancient Middle East, shepherds kept track of their flocks with pebbles,
Figure 1.1. As each sheep left its pen to graze, the shepherd placed one pebble in
a small sack. When all of the sheep had left, the shepherd had a record of how
many sheep were out grazing. When the sheep returned, the shepherd discarded one
pebble for each animal, and if there were more pebbles than sheep, he knew that
some of his sheep still hadn't returned or were missing. This is, indeed, a primitive
but legitimate example of data storage and retrieval. What is important to realize
about this example is that the count of the number of sheep going out and coming
back in was all that the shepherd cared about in his ''business environment'' and
that his primitive data storage and retrieval system satisfied his needs.
Excavations in the Zagros region of Iran, dated to 8500 B.C., have unearthed
clay tokens or counters that we think were used for record keeping in primitive

FIGURE 1.1
Shepherd using pebbles to
keep track of sheep