Week 6 - Database Management Systems

This encyclopedia entry made me realize how little thought I typically give to how data is stored and retrieved in all the programs and applications I interact without on a daily basis. I never considered the immense amount of structure and logic that allows for such efficient data management. Since I did not have much prior experience with Microsoft Access, I followed through some simple tutorials while reading this article so I could get a better understanding of what I was reading. I think it is very clever how each entity/entry has a key attribute that defines it and that key is what allows for relationships between multiple tables. I see this system as being more efficient then using Excel for storing text and numeric data as it eliminates repeat information by having an entry only listed once and then referenced by an attribute in other tables based on a data model. This allows for all data to remain consistent throughout the entire database.

As the reading assignment specifically noted relational databases, I searched for articles that focused on relational database management. The first article I found, A Performance Evaluation of Storing XML Data in Relational Database Management Systems, was a report prepared by a group that designed a technique for automatically mapping an XML file into relations within a relational database management system. They hid all database detail, leaving a transparent framework for user access to XML data, which is both human readable and machine readable. One of the main issues they ran into was how to deal with information that may appear more than once in an XML document. To handle this issue they developed a naming system for each entry that would pad a number appended to the repeated XML data that would both distinguish each entry as well as identify that each were related in their original XML format. They created a document object model based parser that would extract data from the XML file and structure according to the tree hierarchy they developed for their database.

The second article I found was a patent for a relational database management system developed by International Business Machines Corporation in New York. I chose to read this just to get a different type of source since primarily I have only looked at articles from professional journals so far this term. The patent notes that the extension of relational databases in engineering fields has been hampered by the lack of capacity of vendors of relational database products to provide increasingly complex data types and user defined functions. The system described in this patent provides a method for manipulating user application files using relational database management. The core of the system is a structured query language processor that compiles user application files. I thought it was interesting to read this patent because it explained how engineers and researchers are looking to improve how we manage data.