DATA ABSTRACTION-For the system to be usable, it must retrieve data efficiently.

The need for

efficiency has led designers to use complex data structures to represent data in the database. Since
many database users are not computer trained, developers hide the complexity from the users through
several levels of abstraction, to simplify user interactions with the system.

INSTANCE-The collection of information stored in the database at a particular moment is called an

Instance of the database.

SCHEMA-The overall design of the database is called the database schema. Schemas are changed
infrequently, if at all.
Databases have several schemas, partitioned according to the levels of abstraction-
PHYSICAL SCHEMA-It describes the database design at the physical level.
LOGICAL SCHEMA-It describes the database design at the logical level.
VIEW SCHEMA-It is also called as subschema. It describes different views of view database.

DDL-A database system provides provides a data-definition language to specify the database schema.
The DDL is used to specify additional properties of the data.

DML-Data manipulation language is used to express database queries & updates. It enables users to
access or manipulate data as organized by the appropriate data model.
DBA-A person who has central control of both the data’s & the programs that access those data is
called a database administrator. Functions of DBA include-
• Schema Definition.
• Storage space.
• Backup.
• Monitoring jobs.
• Data access allows.

STORAGE MANAGER-The storage manager is the component of the database system that
provides the interface between the low-level data stored in the database & the application programs &
the queries submitted to the system. The storage manager is responsible for the interaction with the
file manager. The raw data are stored in the disk using the file system provided by the operating
system. The storage manager translates the various DML statements into low level file system
commands. Thus, the storage manager is responsible for storing, retrieving& updating the data in the
database. The storage manager components include-
• Authorization & Integrity manager.
• Transaction manager.
• File manager.
• Buffer manager.
• Data files.
• Data Dictionary.
 • Indices.

ENTITY-The entity-relationship (E-R) data model uses a collection of basic objects, called
entities & relationships among these objects. An entity is a “thing” or “object” in the real world
that is distinguishable from other objects.EG-
• Person: Employee, Student.
• Place: City, Department.
• Object: Machine, Building.

ENTITY SET-The set of all the entities of the same type is called an entity set.

DOMAIN-Used to organize & describe an attributes set of possible values.

MAPPING CARDINALITIES-It is a data constraint that specifies how many entities an entity
can be related to in a relationship.EG-A student can work on two projects, the number of students that
work on one project is not limited.
There are 4 possibilities in this case.
• ONE TO ONE, ONE TO MANY, MANY TO ONE, MANY TO MANY.

KEY-An entity identifier, based on the concept of functional dependence.

SUPERKEY-A Super key is a set of one or more attributes that, taken collectively, allow us to
identify a tuple in the relation. For eg:the ID attribute if relation Instructor is sufficient to distinguish
one instructor tuple from another. Thus ID is a super key.

CANDIDATE KEY-It is a field or combination of fields that uniquely identify a record in a table,
so that an individual record can be located without confusion.

FOREIGN KEY-It is known as referencing key. It is a key used to link two tables together. If you
take a primary key field from one table & insert into another table where it becomes foreign key.

CANDIDATE KEY-It is an attribute or set of attributes that uniquely identify an instance of an

entity-Student could be identified by their id or roll no. Some entities have more than candidate keys.
ER DIAGRAM-It is an overall logical structure of a database that can be expressed classically. It
provides a convenient graphical representation to view data, relationships & constraints.

AGGREGATION-It is an abstraction in which relationship sets are treated as higher-level entity

sets, & can participate in relationships.

RELATIONSHIP-It is an association among several entities. A relationship set is a collection of

relationships of the same type.
WEAK ENTITY SET-An entity set which does not have sufficient attributes to form a primary key
is termed a weak entity set.

STRONG ENTITY SET-It is an entity which exists on its own, independent.An entity set that has
a primary key is termed as a strong entity set.

SPECIALIZATION-The process of designating sub groupings within an entity set is called

specialization. The specialization of person allows us to distinguish among person entities according to
whether they correspond to employees or students.

GENERALIZATION-It is a result of taking the union of two or more disjoint (low-level) entity sets
to produce a higher level entity set.

NATURAL JOIN-It is a binary operation that allows us to combine certain selections & a Cartesian
product into one operation. It is denoted by the join symbol .

OUTERJOIN OPERATION-The outer join operation is an extension of the join operation to deal
with missing information.

NULL VALUE-The null value indicates that the value does not exist.
JDBC-The JDBC standard defines an application program interface (API) that java programs can use
to connect to database servers. JAVA DATABASE CONNECTIVITY.

FIFTH NORMAL FORM (PJNF-PROJECT JOIN NORMAL FORM)-There are types of

constraints called join dependencies that generalize multivalued dependencies & lead to another
normal form called project join normal form-pjnf, also called as fifth normal form.