Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
company that need it. Furthermore, public companies have a responsibility to
their shareholders to competently manage the company's assets. Can you imagine
a company's money just sort of out there somewhere without being carefully
managed? In fact, the chief financial officer with a staff of accountants and financial
professionals is responsible for the money, with outside accounting firms providing
independent audits of it. Typically vice presidents of personnel and their staffs are
responsible for the administrative functions necessary to manage employee affairs.
Production managers at various levels are responsible for parts inventories, and so
on. Data is no exception.
But data may just be the most difficult corporate resource to manage. In data,
we have a resource of tremendous volume, billions, trillions, and more individual
pieces of data, each piece of which is different from the next. And it has the
characteristic that much of it is in a state of change at any one time. It's not as if
we're talking about managing a company's employees. Even the largest companies
have only a few hundred thousand of them, and they don't change all that frequently.
Or the money a company has: sure, there is a lot of it, but it's all the same in the
sense that a dollar that goes to payroll is the same kind of dollar that goes to paying
a supplier for raw materials.
As far back as the early to mid-1960s, barely ten years after the introduction
of commercially viable electronic computers, some forward-looking companies
began to realize that storing each application's data separately, in simple files, was
becoming problematic and would not work in the long run, for just the reasons
that we've talked about: the increasing volumes of data (even way back then), the
increasing demand for data access, the need for data security, privacy, backup,
and recovery, and the desire to share data and cut down on data redundancy.
Several things were becoming clear. The task was going to require both a new
kind of software to help manage the data and progressively faster hardware to
keep up with the increasing volumes of data and data access demands. And
data-management specialists would have to be developed, educated, and made
responsible for managing the data as a corporate resource.
Out of this need was born a new kind of software, the database management
system (DBMS), and a new category of personnel, with titles like database
administrator and data management specialist. And yes, hardware has progressively
gotten faster and cheaper for the performance it provides. The integration of these
advances adds up to much more than the simple sum of their parts. They add up to
the database environment.
The Database Environment
Back in the early 1960s, the emphasis in what was then called data processing was on
programming. Data was little more than a necessary afterthought in the application
development process and in running the data-processing installation. There was a
good reason for this. By today's standards, the rudimentary computers of the time
had very small main memories and very simplistic operating systems. Even relatively
basic application programs had to be shoehorned into main memory using low-level
programming techniques and a lot of cleverness. But then, as we progressed further
into the 1960s and beyond, two things happened simultaneously that made this
picture change forever. One was that main memories became progressively larger
and cheaper and operating systems became much more powerful. Plus, computers
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