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Preface
TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 6.0 - Database Management
6Database ManagementLarge-scale computer applications require rapid access to a large amount of data. Thus, database technology has become a significant and rapidly growing domain in modern software industry. The database products from several American companies such as IBM Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Informix Corporation, Sybase Incorporated, and Teradata Corporation are the most popular ones in the current world market. Relational databases are still the mainstream commercial products in the database field nowadays. This chapter is intended to provide a discussion on the relational database management systems, which are now being widely used in a variety of software-intensive industrial automation systems. The real-world industrial applications have many demanding requirements on gathering, organizing, sorting, querying, managing, and reporting a large amount of real-time and historical data, which contains the running conditions in the shop floor. With the rapid development of modern computer technology, the database management technology is also fully computerized. A number of data management technologies have emerged to accomplish the effective and efficient data access, management, and control. By doing so, the data quality is assured and the system privacy is guaranteed in a systematic manner. Therefore, it is highly necessary for the developer to have a deep understanding on the inner working of database systems. However, at the moment, most industrial automation software developers do not have a solid theoretical background on databases. Usually they put the database issues aside in the analysis and design phases and they are only considered in the implementation phase. It is true that small-scale databases can be easily designed with a little database knowledge. However, for the large-scale database, the lack of knowledge on database working mechanism will very possibly lead to poor system performance or even the failure of the overall software system. Anyway, data is the central component in any industrial automation system. Without scientific and systematic database management, the design objective will never be successfully achieved. In this section, the general knowledge on database management is introduced. The detailed implementation of database technologies on industrial automation systems will be fleshed out in the specific application in Part II of this book. |
