What are the similarities between database and file based system?

Answer 1

These maybe appear to be similar but they have very important differences.

Data Base: It contains a collection of current status of the stored data. The structure is achieved by organising the data according to a data base model. Today, the most common model is the rational model. The most important task of on-line operational database system is to perform on-line transaction and query processing. So, these systems are named Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) systems. Moreover, database system support ad-hoc query and online transaction processing, can be used for other purposes such as data warehousing.

Data Warehouse: Data warehouse is a repository of information collected from multiple sources, such as different databases of a company in different places, which stored under a unified schema, over a history of time. Moreover, it is used for decision support and data analysis. It consists of a process of data cleaning, data integration, data transform, data loading, and data refreshing. Data warehouse is used for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP).

The major difference between OLTP and OLAP are summarised as follows:

OLTP is customer-oriented and it's used by clients, and clerks. But, OLAP is market-oriented and is used for data analysis by managers and analysts.

These have different content too, the first one has current data with detail. Furthermore, is easily used for getting decision; however, another one has large amount of historical data, which provides facilities for summarisation, and store information in different levels of granularity. Because of their huge volume, OLAP data are stored on multiple storage media.

The main similarity is that both of them are repositories of information, storage large amounts of data.

Answer 2

The similarities are:

Database schema may be similar (Primary keys, foreign keys and indexes etc)

SQL (Structures query language is also similar in a way)

Referential integrity is also similar to a great extend)