G5 Flashcards
Data are a vital organizational resource that need to be managed like other important
business assets.
Data Resource Management
Today’s business enterprises cannot survive or succeed without quality data about their
internal operations and external environment.
Data Resource Management
is a managerial activity that applies information systems
technologies like database management, data warehousing, and other data management
tools to the task of managing an organization’s data resources to meet the information
needs of their business stakeholders.
Data Resource Management
Types of databases
- Operational Databases
- Distributed Databases
- External Databases
- Hypermedia Databases
store detailed data needed to support the business processes and operations of a
company.
Operational Databases
are also called subject area databases (SADB), transaction databases, and
production databases.
Operational Databases
Examples are a customer database, human resource database, inventory
database, and other databases containing data generated by business operations.
Operational Databases
For example, a human resource database would include data identifying each
employee and his or her time worked, compensation, benefits, performance
Operational Databases
Many organizations replicate and distribute copies or parts of databases to network
servers at a variety of sites.
Distributed Databases
can reside on network servers on the World Wide
Web, on corporate intranets or extranets, or on other company networks
Distributed Databases
Distributed databases may be copies of operational or analytical databases,
hypermedia or discussion databases, or any other type of database.
Distributed Databases
Replication and distribution of databases improve database performance at end-
user worksites.
Distributed Databases
Ensuring that the data in an organization’s distributed databases are consistently
and concurrently updated is a major challenge of distributed database
management.
Distributed Databases
Often, a large database system may be distributed into
smaller databases based on some logical relationship between the data and the
location. For example, a company with several branch operations may distribute
its data so that each branch operation location is also the location of its branch
database. Because multiple databases in a distributed system can be joined
together, each location has control of its local data while all other locations can
access any database in the company if so desired.
Storage requirements:
a company distributes its database to multiple
locations, any change to the data in one location must somehow be updated in all
other locations.
Maintenance of data accuracy:
This updating can be accomplished in one of two ways:
replication or duplication.
Involves using a specialized software application that looks at each
distributed database and then finds the changes made to it.
replication
Once these changes have been identified, the replication process makes
all of the distributed databases look the same by making the appropriate
changes to each one.
replication
Is very complex and, depending on the number and
size of the distributed databases, can consume a lot of time and computer
resources.
replication
is much less complicated.
Duplication
identifies one database as a master and then duplicates that database at
a prescribed time after hours so that each distributed location has the same
data.
Duplication
s that no changes can ever be
made to any database other than the master to avoid having local changes
overwritten during the duplication process.
Duplication
can keep all
distributed locations current with the latest data.
Duplication
One additional challenge is the extra computing power and bandwidth necessary
to access multiple databases in multiple locations.
Duplication
Websites provide an endless variety of hyperlinked pages of multimedia
documents in hypermedia databases for us to access.
External Databases
Data are available in the form of statistics on economic and demographic activity
from statistical databanks, or we can view or download abstracts or complete
copies of hundreds of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, research papers, and
other published material and periodicals from bibliographic and full-text databases.
External Databases
Whenever we use a search engine like Google or Yahoo to look up something on
the Internet, we are using an external database - a very, very large one!
External Databases
The rapid growth of Web sites on the Internet and corporate intranets and
extranets has dramatically increased the use of databases of hypertext and
hypermedia documents.
Hypermedia Databases