Discuss database system versus file system?

Answer 1

A database is a collection of interrelated data's stored in a database server; these data's will be stored in the form of tables. The primary aim of database is to provide a way to store and retrieve database information in fast and efficient manner.

There are number of characteristics that differs from traditional file management system. In file system approach, each user defines and implements the needed files for a specific application to run. For example in sales department of an enterprise, One user will be maintaining the details of how many sales personnel are there in the sales department and their grades, these details will be stored and maintained in a separate file.

Another user will be maintaining the salesperson salary details working in the concern, the detailed salary report will be stored and maintained in a separate file. Although both of the users are interested in the data's of the salespersons they will be having their details in a separate files and they need different programs to manipulate their files. This will lead to wastage of space and redundancy or replication of data's, which may lead to confusion, sharing of data among various users is not possible, data inconsistency may occur. These files will not be having any inter-relationship among the data's stored in these files. Therefore in traditional file processing every user will be defining their own constraints and implement the files needed for the applications.

In database approach, a single repository of data is maintained that is defined once and then accessed by many users. The fundamental characteristic of database approach is that the database system not only contains data's but it contains complete definition or description of the database structure and constraints. These definitions are stored in a system catalog, which contains the information about the structure and definitions of the database. The information stored in the catalog is called the metadata, it describes the primary database. Hence this approach will work on any type of database for example, insurance database, Airlines, banking database, Finance details, and Enterprise information database. But in traditional file processing system the application is developed for a specific purpose and they will access specific database only.