Database Management Systems in Business: Technologies and Tools

Database management systems enable businesses to convey information related to sales transactions, product inventory, marketing activities, and customer profiles.

The database is defined as a group of electronic records, generally stored and accessed from a computer system. The database can be processed to extract useful information, modified, maintained, controlled, and organized. By having a centralized place to store all the critical data, businesses can reduce replicated information, assure data consistency and integrity.

The databases include: object-oriented, distributed, relational, hierarchical, network help businesses to achieve the best performance. Therefore, database management tools refer to a lucrative service for outsourcing software development companies to start delivering their solutions.

An introduction to the database management system

In general, a database management system is a part of the software development bundle designed to define, retrieve and control data in a database. A database management system will define rules and manipulate the data format, record structure, file structure, and field names.

In terms of functionalities, the database system helps with data execution, including extraction, security, data logging, and auditing. Besides, it also provides concurrency support and data transactions.

In mobile apps and web applications development, database management solutions enable developers to arrange data in a logical setup. Then, they could handily determine bugs and problems in developing processes.

Types of advanced database management systems

Hierarchical system: this type of database management tool organizes data in a tree-like arrangement, in a hierarchy structure. This model commonly includes one-to-one and one-to-many relationships. The advantages of this model are bringing a fast and straightforward solution to the collecting information process.

Network system: This model is a slightly complicated extension of the hierarchical model but includes many-to-many relationships. This database structure brings the ability to build more relationships among various data types and make the databases more efficient.

Relational system: This model is regularly used for arranging databases. The database is normalized and organized in logical tables independently also preserves the reliability of the connections between them.

Object-Oriented system: This model is illustrated as a group of objects, which stores both values and operations. This type of database management system integrates with object-oriented programming languages, which software developers can upgrade the uniformity of a single programming environment.

Data management system and the risk of unstructured data

The database mainly included vital personal and business information, valuable material for companies to understand the present performance, estimating, and building future operation plans. That’s why, without a transparent data organizing system, businesses will have trouble collecting essential data and keeping those for future use. Recent reports suggested that unstructured data will be an unsustainable burden, which also became a severe barrier to businesses shortly.

Problems of not using database management tools

• Time-consuming: Without database management systems, processing raw data can be difficult and time-consuming. Besides, the sifting process includes enormous data sets that take hours of valuable time, putting the business at a disadvantaged stage against its competitors who already used database management tools.
• Limitations in reporting and forecasting: Lack of data-driven strategies, businesses are unable to generate valued reports and deliver a clear forecast for the future plan. Unorganized data will make business challenging to make accurate conclusions to create a marketing strategy.
• Unpreparedness when facing issues: By being unable to collect necessary information, it is challenging for businesses to create a recovery plan when dealing with issues or problems.
• Employee Issue: Using humans instead of management software may lead to the loss of many documents as it’s challenging to retain in many years by paper.

Businesses do need database management software

In fact, the volume of business data was reported to increase roundly 60% annually. Therefore, the role of database management tools becomes essential for every business to uncover the information effectively. Following are advantages of database management systems to increase the business value of an organization’s data assets.

1. Improved Data Sharing and Data Security: Integrated database management systems enhance the accessibility to the organizational data, in which the end-users are benefited from sharing the information quickly and effectively across the organization. Also, through the software, only authorized users are allowed to access the database, and user identities could be authenticated by using a username and password to protect critical information, financial data, transactions, and more.
2. Deliver cost-effective solutions for business: Another advantage of database systems is that it enables businesses to avoid unnecessary duplication. Particularly duplicated research and analysis conducted by other employees. Furthermore, with the speedy accessibility to vital information, researchers can be notified about the market changes sooner to avert cost issues.
3. Better Data Integration: The accurate and consistent analysis of the system provides a clear picture of the operations, delivering a clear forecast to help the business make confident future decisions. In a software development context, the dev team can quickly gather needed data, locate necessary information before developing the software. This action will help the software delivered to the public will remain the best performance to the users.
4. Provide backup and recovery: Primary data loss can result in unorganized data, human-caused events, or accidental deletion of data. A survey has been conducted that businesses globally that lost their data have suffered huge value losses, damaged customer trust, and reputation devastation. In that case, the database management systems can help backing up data in case of failures and automation recovery for all organizational data. That means businesses can retain their credibility, boost their reputation and protect critical data and information.

In conclusion, applied database management systems in software development tend to be recent and features in many IT companies. Businesses using this service can promise to deter data uncertainty and maintain the fluidity of the data process.