A database management system has following characteristics:
- Data stored into Tables: Data is never directly stored into the database. Data is stored into tables, created inside the database. DBMS also allows to have relationships between tables which makes the data more meaningful and connected. You can easily understand what type of data is stored where by looking at all the tables created in a database.
- Reduced Redundancy: In the modern world hard drives are very cheap, but earlier when hard drives were too expensive, unnecessary repetition of data in database was a big problem. But DBMS follows Normalization which divides the data in such a way that repetition is minimum.
- Data Consistency: On Live data, i.e. data that is being continuously updated and added, maintaining the consistency of data can become a challenge. But DBMS handles it all by itself.
- Support Multiple user and Concurrent Access: DBMS allows multiple users to work on it(update, insert, delete data) at the same time and still manages to maintain the data consistency.
- Query Language: DBMS provides users with a simple Query language, using which data can be easily fetched, inserted, deleted and updated in a database.
- Security: The DBMS also takes care of the security of data, protecting the data from un-authorized access. In a typical DBMS, we can create user accounts with different access permissions, using which we can easily secure our data by restricting user access.
- DBMS supports transactions, which allows us to better handle and manage data integrity in real world applications where multi-threading is extensively used.
Advantages of DBMS
- Segregation of application program.
- Minimal data duplicity or data redundancy.
- Easy retrieval of data using the Query Language.
- Reduced development time and maintenance need.
- With Cloud Datacenters, we now have Database Management Systems capable of storing almost infinite data.
- Seamless integration into the application programming languages which makes it very easier to add a database to almost any application or website.
Disadvantages of DBMS
- It's Complexity
- Except MySQL, which is open source, licensed DBMSs are generally costly.
- They are large in size.
