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DATABASE

The earliest known use of the term «data base» was in June 1963, when the System Development Corporation sponsored a symposium under the title Development and Management of a Computer-centered Data Base. Database as a single word became common in Europe in the early 1970s and by the end of the decade it was being used in major American newspapers. (Databank, a comparable term, had been used in the Washington Post newspaper as early as 1966.)

The term database originated within the computer industry. A database is a collection of records stored in a computer in a systematic way, so that a computer program can consult it to answer questions. The items retrieved in answer to queries become information that can be used to make decisions. The computer program used to manage and query a database is known as a database management system (DBMS). The properties and design of database systems are included in the study of information science.

The central concept of a database is that of a collection of records or pieces of knowledge. Typically, for a given database, there is a structural description of the type of facts held in that database: this description is known as a schema. The schema describes the objects that are represented in the database, and the relationships among them. There are a number of different ways of organizing a schema, that is, of modeling the database structure: these are known as database models (or data models).The model in most common use today is the relational model, which in layman's terms represents all information in the form of multiple related tables, each consisting of rows and columns (the true definition uses mathematical terminology).

This model represents relationships by the use of values common to more than one table. Other models such as the hierarchical model and the network model use a more explicit representation of relationships.

Strictly speaking, the term database refers to the collection of related records, and the software should be referred to as the database management system or DBMS. When the context is unambiguous, however, many «database» administrators and programmers use the term database to cover both meanings.

Many professionals would consider a collection of data to constitute a database only if it has certain properties: for example, if the data is managed to ensure its integrity and quality, if it allows shared access by a community of users, if it has a schema, or if it supports a query language. However, there is no agreed definition of these properties.

Database management systems are usually categorized according to the data model that they support: relational, object-relational, network, and so on. The data model will tend to determine the query languages that are available to access the database. A great deal of the internal engineering of a DBMS, however, is independent of the data model, and is concerned with managing factors such as performance, concurrency, integrity, and recovery from hardware failures. In these areas there are large differences between products. The first database management systems were developed in the 1960s. A pioneer in the field was Charles Bachman. Bachman's early papers show that his aim was to make more effective use of the new direct access storage devices becoming available: until then, data processing had been based on punched cards and magnetic tape, so that serial processing was the dominant activity. Two key data models arose at this time: CODASYL developed the network model based on Bachman's ideas, and (apparently independently) the hierarchical model was used in a system developed by North American Rockwell, later adopted by IBM as the cornerstone of their IBM product. The relational model was proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. The first successful database product for microcomputers was dBASE for the CP/M and PC-DOS/MS-DOS operating systems.

During the 1980s, research activity focused on distributed database systems and database machines, but these developments had little effect on the market.

In the 1990s, attention shifted to object-oriented databases. These had some success in fields where it was necessary to handle more complex data than relational systems could easily cope with, such as spatial databases, engineering data (including software engineering repositories), and multimedia data. Some of these ideas were adopted by the relational vendors, who integrated new features into their products as a result.

In the 2000s, the fashionable area for innovation is the XML database. As with object databases, this has spawned a new collection of startup companies, but at the same time the key ideas are being integrated into the established relational products.

XML databases aim to remove the traditional divide between documents and data, allowing all of an organization's information resources to be held in one place, whether they are highly structured or not.

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Task 2. Write out main terms from the text and give explanation in English.