| At its simplest, a database is a way of storing organized information persistently. That concept is so fundamental to the needs of computing and the digital environment that databases these days are invisibly ubiquitous. |
| The technology involved is concerned primarily with maintaining the internal representation of data consistent with external reality; this involves areas such as user requirements analysis, data modeling, data integrity, concurrency, transactions, file organization, indexing, rollback and recovery, persistent programming, object-orientation, to name just a few. |
| There are really two sides to any database-driven application. First there is the database itself, which pretty much lies low and out of sight under the hood, and then there is the interface, also known as the front end or what the user sees. |
| In a large modern enterprise, it is almost inevitable that different portions of the organization will use different database management systems to store and search their critical data. Competition, evolving technology, mergers, acquisitions, geographic distribution, and the inevitable decentralization of growth all contribute to this diversity. Yet it is only by combining the information from these systems that the enterprise can realize the full value of the data they contain. |
| The development pace of computing appears to accelerate year on year. DBMS have been maturing slowly over the last twenty years and have reached a high level of reliability. The future will call for efficient handling of objects and sophisticated Web serving. Object storage will be interesting to watch - especially as the demand ramps up for libraries to store and deliver more and more images, digitized texts, and video etc. |
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