Zusammenfassung der Ressource
ICT OCR A Level - Distributed Databases
- What are they?
- A single logical databse
- All parts are physically in
different locations
- Parts are
accessible over
a network.
- A standard Database
looks like:
- A typical database
looks like:
- Each site has a Database
Management System (DBMS)
- Allows queries to be
made locally
- Also has a Distributed Database
Management System
- Allows queries to be made globally for the whole system
- Why use them?
- Examples of uses:
- Travel company with
branches across the globe
- International car
manufacturer
- Supermarket stocks with
multiple branches
- Some companies may need information up to date all
of the time
- Access the data globally once a user has
updated the files.
- Distributed databases reduce the risk of losing
work
- Central database is updated overnight
- Batch processing
- If the network goes down, then work is not lost and
employees can work as normal until the issues are fixed.
- Mainly independant; if one branch goes down, the others aren't affected
- Duplicated Databases
- Local copy of each part of the entire
database is kept at each location
- Not very practical for a number of
reasons.
- Disadvantages.
- Very heavy use of the network
- Whole database may be large and require a lot of storage
space
- Difficult to keep all copies up to date simultaneously
- Does not scale well if
the company grows
- Wasteful if only certain parts are needed at certain
branches
- Advantage
- More practical if the company is fairly small
- Partitioned Databases
- Database is 'split' or partitioned into
different datasets depending on the
specific needs of the organisation
- Advantages
- Each data store is independant
- Network load is much less
- Higher performance since there is no
network bottleneck
- Easier to solve problems due to
each store being independant
- Scales up very easily
- Disadvantages
- May not be the best solution if each branch
needs constant updates of data
- Needs to be carefully partitioned to keep each
section as local as possible
- Partitioned+Index
- A modification of the partitioned
database is to include an index of all
remote database records as well
- Each store has an index pointing to all
records in the entire database
- Advantages
- Still a high performance as most
queries remain local
- Can efficiently access remote
records by using the index
- Disadvantages
- System must keep all indexes up to date
- More complicated to create and manage
- Overall
- Security
- Multiple entry points, this can make the database less
secure. Each 'node' needs to be kept secure
- Data encryption keys are more likely to be
intercepted if they are spread around the
organisation constantly
- If one node is hacked then the rest of the
organisation is vulnerable as well
- Advantages
- Resilient, if one part of the database stops
working, there rest are not affected
- Security: each employee is able
to access one portion of the data
- Network traffic is
minimised so there is less
bandwidth expenses
- Easier to keep any errors
local
- High performance due to
less network bottleneck
- Disadvantages
- More complex to create and
maintain
- Many entry points to the whole database is less secure
- Data integrity is harder to maintain to ensure the
indexes are not corrupted
- Not as effective if there is heavy interaction
between branches