DBMS

Question 1

ACID

Answer 1

Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability - the properties maintained by standard DBMS’s.

Question 2

Application Server

Answer 2

A component-based product that resides in the middle-tier of a server-centric architecture. It provides middleware services for security and state maintenance, along with data access and persistence.

Question 3

Atomicity

Answer 3

An indivisible and irreducible series of database operations such that either all occur, or nothing occurs.

Example: Money transfer from bank account A to account B. Both transactions (withdrawal from A and deposit to B) must occur or the entire transaction is cancelled.

Question 4

BLOB (acronym)

Answer 4

Binary Large Object (Acronym)

Question 5

BLOB (definition)

Answer 5

A collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a DBMS. Typically images, audio, etc.

Question 6

B-tree

Answer 6

An organizational structure for information storage and retrieval in which all terminal nodes are the same distance from the base, and all nonterminal nodes have between n and 2n pointers.

Question 7

Cache

Answer 7

The computer memory that is set aside to contain a portion of the database data that has most recently been accessed by the database application program. Used to minimize the amount of physical disk I/O performed by the DBMS.

Question 8

Cascade

Answer 8

A foreign key attribute that automatically migrates the changes made to a referenced (primary key) table to all of the referencing (foreign key) table rows.

Question 9

Catalog

Answer 9

A repository for the computer-readable form of a database’s data definition meta-data.

Question 10

Client

Answer 10

Accesses a service made available by a server.

Question 11

Client-Server Model

Answer 11

A distributed application structure that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource service and service requesters.

Question 12

Cloud

Answer 12

Internet-based computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand.

Question 13

Column

Answer 13

A single unit of named data that has a particular data type (within a table).

Question 14

Commit

Answer 14

The action that causes all of the changes made by a particular transaction to be reliably written to the database files and made visible to other users.

Question 15

Concurrency

Answer 15

The property in which two or more computing processes are executing at the same time.

Question 16

Consistency

Answer 16

The property of a transaction that guarantees data is affected only in allowed ways.