Database management systems (DBMS) are designed to define, store, retrieve, and manage the data within a database. It allows users to create, maintain, and manage databases. DBMS manipulates the database as per the user requirements. Using DBMS ensures that the data of an organization is clean, consistent, secure, relevant, and supports concurrency.
Along with the standard database functionalities (e.g., CRUD operations), DBMS software has much stronger management capabilities. These include functions like stronger metadata visibility and analysis, in-depth and custom reporting, performance monitoring, usage analytics, and compliance checks. Extensive solutions may offer capabilities of database backup software, data replication software, disaster recovery software, or disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) software, as well.
Typically used by database administrators, DBMS are integral to preserving database quality and integrity. They fall into a larger database-oriented stack, which can include solutions like database security and database monitoring.
DBMS is used as part of both relational and non-relational databases. DBMS software are of different types, in association with the database being managed and organized. Some of the more popular DBMS are as follows:
- Relational: Associated typically with relational databases, the relational model organizes data tabularly (rows and columns approach) and is currently the most standard database model. DMBS focused on the relational model are referred to as RDBMS.
- Object oriented: Object-oriented databases follow a programming-style, object-oriented approach to entering and organizing data. DBMS aligned with this model are referred to as OODMBS.
- Hierarchical: In a hierarchical model, data is organized with a tree-like structure, where associations (“branches") extend from a point of data. DBMS aligned with this model are sometimes referred to as HDBMS.
- Distributed: Under a distributed database model, data is decentralized and stored across several locations. These locations can be physically local (e.g., different servers in the same data center) or spread apart (perhaps connected via SD-WAN). DMBS aligned with the distributed database model are sometimes referred to as DDBMS.
- Non-relational DBMS or NoSQL DBMS: NoSQL DBMS support both structured and unstructured data. There is no set defined schema as compared to other data models. The key benefit of this DBMS is that users can process queries of various elements and not be limited by the structure.
To qualify for inclusion in the Database Management Systems (DBMS) category, a product must:
- Manage and align with a database model (e.g., relational, object-oriented, hierarchical, distributed, non-relational)
- Can also exist as a standalone tool to manage databases
- Provide database maintenance functionalities
- Provide extensive reporting and activity analytics
