THE DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM CONCEPT - Fundamentals of Database Management Systems - page 49

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Data

Money Plant &

Equipment

FIGURE3.3
Corporate resources

People Inventory

Money, plant and equipment, inventories, and people are all important
enterprise resources and, indeed, a great deal of effort has always been expended
to manage them. As corporations began to realize that data is also an important
enterprise resource, it became increasingly clear that data would have to be managed
in an organized way, too, Figure 3.3. What was needed was a software utility that
could manage and protect data while providing controlled shared access to it so that
it could fulfill its destiny as a critical corporate resource . Out of this need was born
the database management system.
As we look to the future and look back at the developments of the last few years,
we see several phenomena that emphasize the importance of data and demand its
careful management as a corporate resource. These include reengineering, electronic
commerce, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that have placed an
even greater emphasis on data. In reengineering, data and information systems are
aggressively used to redesign business processes for maximum efficiency. At the
heart of every electronic commerce Web site is a database through which companies
and their customers transact business. Another very important development was that
of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which are collections of application
programs built around a central shared database. ERP systems very much embody
the principles of shared data and of data as a corporate resource.

Data Integration and Data Redundancy
Data integration and data redundancy, each in their own right, are critical issues in
the field of database management.

Data integration refers to the ability to tie together pieces of related data within
an information system. If a record in one file contains customer name, address,
and telephone data and a record in another file contains sales data about an item
that the customer has purchased, there may come a time when we want to contact
the customer about the purchased item.

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Data redundancy refers to the same fact about the business environment being
stored more than once within an information system. Data integration is clearly a

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