Concept in Definition ABC

Human beings have a tendency to store data on anything and, in fact, it is not for nothing that it is said that this is the “information age” due to the abundance of it. And it is that every so often, the information that anyone has at their fingertips multiplies, encompassing as much as the total amount of information produced throughout history.

In this omnipresence of information as a valuable tool, information technologies and communication, and it would not be possible without the assistance of computer systems and communications networks such as Internet.

The basis of classified information

Another key element in this overabundance of information is software. The accumulated data, by themselves, tell us nothing. It is as if in an office we had piled up sheets and sheets with written texts (okay, okay, something that happens to many of us ...). They would be of no use if we did not have them grouped into books or works with their corresponding index to find what we are looking for.

In the same way, we have tools at our disposal to organize and structure the information within our computers. These tools, which can be of different types depending on the way they work, receive a common name: DBMS, acronym in English for Management System Database (SGBD in Spanish).

The different types

There are many software that allows us to manage databases, from the simplest ones that are designed to meet domestic and household needs. small businesses, even large systems conceived to be able to serve large multinationals, supporting millions of transactions in a daily.

The difference between one and the other is found in many aspects but, mainly, we differentiate DBMS by the way they work:

• Relational databases. Probably the most popular. The information is structured in tables, each one representing a type of object and its characteristics. Each table can have one or more fields that allow identifying each record uniquely, and create relationships with other tables. Most of the current database managers belong to this type
• Distributed databases. Supports the distribution of both data and management software, among several computers. Very useful when we have to work in the same organization that has different geographical or national headquarters.
• Hierarchical databases. The data is organized in Format inverted tree. They are ideal for large volumes of information.


• Network databases. A variant of the previous model, the hierarchical one, in which a branch of the inverted tree can not only have several branches, but the same node can come from several branches.
• Transactional databases. If relational is the most common type of DBMS, transactional are the rarest. Oriented for use in banking, business and industrial environments, they base their paradigm of use in performing two operations to complete a transaction, one of them usually to check that pre-established conditions are met.

• Object database. Conceptually similar to relational in some respects, they derive from the same ideas that equipped the languages ​​of programming Object-oriented such as C ++, allowing, for example, creating objects from others, from which they inherit some characteristics.
• Documentary databases. Designed to serve document management applications, dealing with large volumes of text and allowing you to search them.
• Multidimensional databases. Very similar to the relational ones, they are basically used to carry out OLAP applications. A table not only contains columns and values ​​for each record, but also a metric is associated with it. Hence, it expands in various dimensions.
• Deductive databases. It stores facts and rules, with whose inferences it is possible to carry out deductions.

Photos: iStock - Alex Belomlinsky / Nihat Dursun