Management Notes

Management Notes

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What are the 4 Types of Databases?

What are the 4 Types of Databases? – Operational, Distributed, External and Hypermedia | Database Management System

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What are the 4 Types of Databases?

The Four Types of Databases are as follows:

Operational databases

An organization’s business processes and operations rely on detailed data stored in this system. Also called subject area databases (SADBs), transactional databases, and production databases, these databases store a variety of information. Customers, human resources, inventory, and other databases containing business data are examples of operational databases. An employee database, for instance, would contain information about the employee’s hours worked, compensation, benefits, performance appraisals, training, and development status, among other things.

Distributed databases

Databases are replicated and distributed to a number of network servers throughout an organization. Incorporated databases are distributed across many different networks, including World Wide Web servers, corporate intranets, and extranets. There are different types of distributed databases, such as operational databases, analytical databases, hypermedia databases, or discussion databases. By replicating and distributing databases, end users can improve the performance of their databases. It is a major challenge of distributed database management to ensure that data in distributed databases is consistently and concurrently updated.

  • Advantages of Distributed Databases

There are both advantages and disadvantages to distributed databases. Distributed databases provide valuable data protection as one of their primary advantages. A fire or damage to the media holding an organization’s data could result in a catastrophic (disastrous) loss of use of that data if all the organization’s data are located at one location. In such a case, distributing databases in multiple locations can minimize the negative impact.

Distributed databases also have the advantage of requiring less storage space. Data may be divided between logically related databases based on the location of a large database. An organization with several branch offices may distribute its data so that each branch office location contains the branch database as well.

  • Disadvantages of Distributed Databases

Despite their benefits, distributed databases do not come without challenges. Maintaining data accuracy is the primary challenge. Whenever data in one location is changed, all other locations must be updated as well if the company distributes its database across multiple locations. Replication or duplication can be used to accomplish this updating. When updating a distributed database with replication, a specialized software application determines which database has been updated by looking at each version of the database.

After identifying these changes, the replication process makes the appropriate changes to all distributed databases in order to make them look the same. Due to its complexity, replication can consume a lot of time and computer resources, depending on the number and size of distributed databases.The extra computing power and bandwidth needed to access multiple databases in multiple locations is another challenge associated with distributed databases.

External databases

Several commercial online services offer access to external databases for a fee, as do many Internet sources that are free of charge. You can access hypermedia databases full of hyperlinked pages with multimedia documents on web sites. From statistical databanks, you can access economic and demographic statistics, or from bibliographic and full-text databases, you can view and download abstracts or complete copies of thousands of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, research papers, and other publications.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo use an external database to retrieve information on the Internet, and these databases are very, very large.The Google search engine alone conducts 112 million searches a day on average, which is impressive.

Hypermedia databases

Hypertext and hypermedia databases have become increasingly popular as Web sites on the Internet, corporate intranets, and extranets have grown rapidly. Hypermedia databases are used to store such information on Web sites (e.g., text, images, video clips, audio segments, etc.). They are essentially databases of interrelated multimedia elements rather than databases of interconnected data records.

Client PCs can connect to Web network servers using Web browsers. You can access and transfer Web pages from this server using Web server software. Web pages are stored in a hypermedia database that consists of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or XML (Extensible Markup Language) code, image files, video files, and audio files. In order to download hypermedia files, the Web server software acts as a database management system for managing the transfer of hypermedia files.

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