TYPES OF DATABASE

TYPES OF DATABASE

The growth of distributed processing, end user computing and decision support system and executive information system has led to the development of several databases.

Followings are some of the important types of databases.

• Operational Databases
• Management Databases
• Information Warehouse Databases
• Distributed Databases
• End User Databases
• External Databases
• Text Databases
• Images Databases

Operational Databases:

These databases keep the information needed to support the operation of an organisation.

These are main day to day working databases like customer database, employee database and inventory database etc.

Management Databases:

These database keep the selected information and data, extracted mainly from operational and external databases.

These databases are part of decision support system and executive information system to support the decision making process of management.

Information Warehouse Databases:

A data warehouse stores the data of current and previous years.

This is usually a data that has been accumulated from operational and external databases over the years.

This data helps users in analyses of various trends of business activities over a period for decision making process.

These databases are also a kind of central storage data which is available to all the users of an organisation.

Distributed Databases:

These are the databases which are local to departments or regional offices etc.

These databases include the common operational database as well as the database at user end.

These databases main ain is to ensure that organisation database is distributed but updated concurrently to have any time updated information like in Railway Reservation System.

End User Databases:

These databases consists of various data files of word, excel and datbase which an end user has generated at his end or these database also consists the copy of common centralized or distributed database at end user work station.

External Databases:

These databases are also known as online databases provided by various organisations either free or at a normal Fee.

The information of these databases helps management in decision making process.

Text Databases:

These are informative databases available normally on a CD-ROM Disk for certain price.

These databases are normally in documents form but with features like search, modify etc.

For Example: database of industries located in and around Mumbai is available in CD.

Images Databases:

Normally databases contain alpha numeric information.

But there are databases which contain images for various categories.

These databases are also available either on internet or come in CD at some price.

These databases are normally used by advertising, publishing, entertainment and web site deveolopment agencies.