Database System

What is a database system? Return

A database is the electronic version of a manual log. A database is simply a collection of tables that contains information.

Let us first review the manual log. Any company would have a log that contains their customer contact details. There will be another log for customer invoices, and another one for supplier invoices, etc.

As the business grows then the manual operations in recording, searching, sorting and viewing records will increasingly become difficult. An electronic database system is the answer for this situation.

Any database management system will consist of three major parts:

  1. The User Interface.

  2. Which is the program that communicates with the user, which is simply a collection of menus, buttons, text boxes, forms, etc.

  3. The Database Process System.

  4. This is the program that link between the User Interface and the Database Storage.

  5. The Database Storage

  6. Which simply can be regarded as a collection of tables.

Let us have an example:

Figure 2 represent a User Interface form that consist of many buttons. Suppose the user would like to view the Company’s directory then the user would click at the Company’s Button.

The User Interface will message the DB Process System that the User requested the company’s directory. The DB Process System will retrieve the data from the Database Storage and send it to the User Interface (Figure 3).

If the data is about 1Gbyte (about 200,000 records) and the users are less than 20 then Ms Access will be very appropriate as the Database Storage . Otherwise the database system requires a heavy-duty Storage such as MySQL or SQL Server.

In many cases the User Interface will be designed using the same language as the Database Process System. So if the Database Process System is designed using Java then the User Interface would probably be Java as well. This is the same if the DB Process System is designed using C or VB.

In some occasions, the DB Process System might be completely different than the User Interface. For example, many web Database Process Systems are designed using PHP and the User Interfaces are designed using HTML.

In our database systems, the User Interfaces are mainly designed using Ms Access while the Database Process System is designed using VBA (which is a built-in programming language in Ms Access). Our database Storage could either be Ms Access, MySQL, or SQL Server.

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