Sinopsis
Imagine trying to operate a business without knowing who your
customers are, what products you are selling, who is working for you, who owes
you money, and to whom you owe money. All businesses have to keep this type of
data and much more; just as importantly, they must have those data available to
decision makers when necessary. It can be argued that the ultimate purpose of
all business information systems is to help businesses use information as an
organizational resource. At the heart of all of these systems are the
collection, storage, aggregation, manipulation, dissemination, and management of
data.Depending on the type of information system and the
characteristics of the business, these data could vary from a few megabytes on
just one or two topics to terabytes covering hundreds of topics within the
business’s internal and external environment. Telecommunications companies such
as Sprint and AT&T are known to have systems that keep data on trillions of
phone calls, with new data being added to the system at speeds up to 70,000
calls per second!1 Not
only do these companies have to store and manage immense collections of data,
they have to be able to find any given fact in that data quickly. Consider the
case of Internet search staple Google. While Google is reluctant to disclose
many details about its data storage specifications, it is estimated that the
company responds to over 91 million searches per day across a collection of data
that is several terabytes in size. Impressively, the results of these searches
are available almost instantly.
How can these businesses process this much data? How can they
store it all, and then quickly retrieve just the facts that decision makers want
to know, just when they want to know it? The answer is that they use databases.
Databases, as explained in detail throughout this book, are specialized
structures that allow computer-based systems to store, manage, and retrieve data
very quickly. Virtually all modern business systems rely on databases;
therefore, a good understanding of how these structures are created and their
proper use is vital for any information systems professional. Even if your
career does not take you down the amazing path of database design and
development, databases will be a key component underpinning the systems that you
use. In any case, you will probably make decisions in your career based on
information generated from data. Thus, it is important that you know the
difference between data and information.
Content
- What a database is, the various types of databases, and why they are valuable assets for decision making
- The importance of database design
- How modern databases evolved from file systems
- About flaws in file system data management
- The main components of the database system
- The main functions of a database management system (DBMS)
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