20 Facts you need to know about RDBMS
Knowledge base
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- Foundation in Theory: The concept of the RDBMS is based on the relational model introduced by Edgar F. Codd in 1970, fundamentally changing how data is processed and stored.
- Tables Structure: In an RDBMS, data is stored in tables, which are organized into rows and columns. Each row represents a record, and each column represents a data field.
- Primary Keys: Each table in an RDBMS has a primary key, which uniquely identifies each row. This is crucial for ensuring data integrity.
- Foreign Keys: RDBMS supports foreign keys, which are used to create relationships between tables. This allows for the relational part of the relational database.
- ACID Compliance: RDBMS systems support ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties, ensuring reliable transaction processing and data integrity.
- Normalization: RDBMS often uses normalization, a process that reduces data redundancy and improves data integrity by organizing fields and table relationships.
- SQL Support: Almost all RDBMS use SQL as the standard language for writing and querying data, although they might add their proprietary extensions.
- Scalability: Modern RDBMS are highly scalable, capable of handling vast amounts of data and numerous concurrent users.
- Security Features: RDBMS typically provide robust security features, including user authentication, access controls, and encryption, to protect sensitive data.
- Data Recovery: RDBMS often includes tools for backup and recovery to ensure data can be restored after physical or logical corruption.
- Multi-user Access: RDBMS allows multiple users to access the database simultaneously, managing concurrent access to ensure data consistency.
- Transaction Support: They support transactions, which are sequences of operations performed as a single logical unit of work, ensuring data integrity even in complex scenarios.
- Indexes: RDBMS can use indexes to speed up the retrieval of records, enhancing performance with large databases.
- Query Optimization: They have a query optimizer that automatically optimizes queries to ensure efficient data retrieval.
- View Support: RDBMS allows the creation of views which are virtual tables based on the result-set of an SQL statement. Views can simplify complex operations.
- Stored Procedures and Triggers: Many RDBMS support stored procedures and triggers which are sets of SQL statements that can be triggered by events, which helps in automating repetitive tasks.
- Cloud Integration: Modern RDBMS solutions are cloud-compatible, allowing databases to be hosted on a cloud platform, offering flexibility and scalability.
- Data Integrity Constraints: RDBMS allows for the definition of integrity constraints, such as unique, check, and not null constraints, to enforce business rules on the data.
- Data Dictionary: Each RDBMS includes a data dictionary which is a read-only set of tables that provides information about the database’s schema. This is essential for database management and optimization.
- Wide Adoption: The most commonly used RDBMS in the industry include Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and IBM Db2, each offering unique features tailored to different needs.