INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT - questions and answers

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 INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

ASSIGNMENT 2003-04

1. What are some of the major advantages of organizing information in a database as opposed to the file management approach?

There are many advantages of organizing information in a database as opposed to the file management approach. The most obvious advantage is perhaps the fact that you will no longer need filing cabinets. If there is a lot of information involved to be managed, the use of a database will save a lot of space and ease the workload for the users. But there are a lot of other advantages like consistency of data. Unlike the file management approach, each item of data in a database is only held once, this means that there is no danger of an item being updated on one system and not on another. And that brings us to another major advantage, control over redundancy. In a non-database system, the same information may be held on several files. This wastes space and makes updating more time-consuming. A database system minimises these effects.

Data independence is another benefit of the database approach. In short, data independence means that the data is held in such a way that changes to the structure of the database do not affect any of the programs used to access the data.

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Other advantages that organizing information in a database brings are integrity of data and greater security of data. With a database management system (DBMS), users are provided with the ability to specify constraints on data such as making a field entry essential or using a validation routine. A DBMS can also ensure that only authorised users are allowed access to the data. This also means that you can have a centralised control of data, the database administrator will control who has access to what and will structure the database with the needs of the whole department in mind.

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