In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze the data. The DBMS additionally encompasses the core facilities provided to administer the database. The sum total of the database, the DBMS and the associated applications can be referred to as a database system. Often the term "database" is also used loosely to refer to any of the DBMS, the database system or an application associated with the database.
A distributed database is a database in which data is stored across different physical locations. It may be stored in multiple computers located in the same physical location ; or maybe dispersed over a network of interconnected computers. Unlike parallel systems, in which the processors are tightly coupled and constitute a single database system, a distributed database system consists of loosely coupled sites that share no physical components.
A data dictionary, or metadata repository, as defined in the IBM Dictionary of Computing, is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format". Oracle defines it as a collection of tables with metadata. The term can have one of several closely related meanings pertaining to databases and database management systems (DBMS):
IMAGE is a database management system (DBMS) developed by Hewlett-Packard and included with the HP 3000 minicomputer. It was the primary reason for that platform's success in the market. It was also sometimes referred to as IMAGE/3000 in its initial release, and later versions were known as TurboIMAGE, and TurboIMAGE/XL after the PA-RISC migration.
A federated database system (FDBS) is a type of meta-database management system (DBMS), which transparently maps multiple autonomous database systems into a single federated database. The constituent databases are interconnected via a computer network and may be geographically decentralized. Since the constituent database systems remain autonomous, a federated database system is a contrastable alternative to the task of merging several disparate databases. A federated database, or virtual database, is a composite of all constituent databases in a federated database system. There is no actual data integration in the constituent disparate databases as a result of data federation.
MonetDB is an open-source column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS) originally developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It is designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, such as combining tables with hundreds of columns and millions of rows. MonetDB has been applied in high-performance applications for online analytical processing, data mining, geographic information system (GIS), Resource Description Framework (RDF), text retrieval and sequence alignment processing.
A column-oriented DBMS or columnar DBMS is a database management system (DBMS) that stores data tables by column rather than by row. Benefits include more efficient access to data when only querying a subset of columns, and more options for data compression. However, they are typically less efficient for inserting new data.
In computing, the term data warehouse appliance (DWA) was coined by Foster Hinshaw for a computer architecture for data warehouses (DW) specifically marketed for big data analysis and discovery that is simple to use and has a high performance for the workload. A DWA includes an integrated set of servers, storage, operating systems, and databases.
The Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) is an annual computer science conference focused on research into new techniques for data management. It was started in 2002 by Michael Stonebraker, Jim Gray, and David DeWitt as a biennial conference to be held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. In 2020, it was transformed into an annual conference with alternating location between Amsterdam and the USA.
Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."
Vertica is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by the database researcher Michael Stonebraker with Andrew Palmer as the founding CEO. Ralph Breslauer and Christopher P. Lynch served as CEOs later on.
Database preservation usually involves converting the information stored in a database to a form likely to be accessible in the long term as technology changes, without losing the initial characteristics of the data.
A data stream management system (DSMS) is a computer software system to manage continuous data streams. It is similar to a database management system (DBMS), which is, however, designed for static data in conventional databases. A DBMS also offers a flexible query processing so that the information needed can be expressed using queries. However, in contrast to a DBMS, a DSMS executes a continuous query that is not only performed once, but is permanently installed. Therefore, the query is continuously executed until it is explicitly uninstalled. Since most DSMS are data-driven, a continuous query produces new results as long as new data arrive at the system. This basic concept is similar to Complex event processing so that both technologies are partially coalescing.
Shadow tables are objects in computer science used to improve the way machines, networks and programs handle information. More specifically, a shadow table is an object that is read and written by a processor and contains data similar to its primary table, which is the table it's "shadowing". Shadow tables usually contain data that is relevant to the operation and maintenance of its primary table, but not within the subset of data required for the primary table to exist. Shadow tables are related to the data type "trails" in data storage systems. Trails are very similar to shadow tables but instead of storing identically formatted information that is different, they store a history of modifications and functions operated on a table.
Actian Vector is an SQL relational database management system designed for high performance in analytical database applications. It published record breaking results on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark for database sizes of 100 GB, 300 GB, 1 TB and 3 TB on non-clustered hardware.
The following is provided as an overview of and topical guide to databases:
NewSQL is a class of relational database management systems that seek to provide the scalability of NoSQL systems for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads while maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system.
Martin L. Kersten was a computer scientist with research focus on database architectures, query optimization and their use in scientific databases. He was an architect of the MonetDB system, an open-source column store for data warehouses, online analytical processing (OLAP) and geographic information systems (GIS). He has been (co-) founder of several successful spin-offs of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI).
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to MySQL:
Gautam Das is a computer scientist in the field of databases research. He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.
