Karlstad University

Department of Information Systems

Adapted for a textbook by Date C. J.

An Introduction to

Database Systems

Pearson Addison Wesley, 2004

Database System Architecture

Remigijus GUSTAS
Phone: +46-54 700 17 65
E-mail: Remigijus.Gustas@kau.se
http://www.cs.kau.se/~gustas/

ANSI/SPARC architecture
American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
Standards Planning And Requirements Committee (SPARC)
External level
(individual view)

Conceptual (logical) level

(community view)
Internal (implementation) level
(storage view)

Remigijus Gustas

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Conceptual Level

Global logical representation

Shared by all users

Consensus on underlying meaning of the data

Foundation for database design

Defined by conceptual schema

Implemented via conceptual DDL



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Must not involve any implementation considerations

Definitions of information content only

Remigijus Gustas

Internal Level

Physical representation of the entire database

Consist of many occurrences of many types of
stored records

Defined by (yet another) the internal schema DDL

Also specifies what indexes exist, how stored
fields are represented, what is the physical
sequence of the stored records

Includes pointers

Hardware dependent
Remigijus Gustas

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External Level

Supports single or groups of users

An external view is defined by external schema

Different users will require different views

Most systems allow SQL to be used as a stand
alone query language or embedded in other
languages (Java, C++, PL/I)

Implemented via SQL views

References subsets of overall information
architecture
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Mappings

One Conceptual/internal mapping
Defines correspondences between the
conceptual view and stored database

Several External/conceptual mappings
 Different views can overlap

Most relational systems permit
External/external mappings
 Views are mapped to other views


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Remigijus Gustas

Database Administrator

Participates in conceptual database design

Determines how to implement conceptual schema

Teach users, help them to define external
schemas, consulting on application design

Implement security and integrity constraints

Implement unload/reload (dump/restore) utilities


Very large databases for continuous availability require

careful and sophisticated administration

Monitor and tune database performance



Reorganizing database to ensure acceptable

performance
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DBMS versus File system

File managers are not aware of the internal
structure of records and cannot handle requests
that rely on knowledge of record structure

Little or no support for recovery, concurrency,
security or integrity control

Files are typically not integrated or shared, but
instead are usually private

File managers provide much less data
independence than DBMS does
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Client/Server Architecture

The purpose of DBMS is to support database
applications



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Clients are various applictions that run on top of DBMS

Server is DBMS itself

Remigijus Gustas

Distributed Processing: One server

and many client machines

Server machine can be tailored to DBMS function

Client machine might be a personal workstation

Several client machines are able to access the
server machine
Communication
Network

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Distributed Processing: each machine

runs both as a client and a server

One portion of data is stored on one computer and another portion on

a different machine, occasional access to data on the other computer
1) A client might be able to access any number of servers (one at a time)
2) A client might be able to access many servers simultaneously

Case 2 is called a
Distributed DBMS

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Communication
Network

Remigijus Gustas