Database Terms

• Aggregation - Objects that are composed of other objects.
• Concurrency - Databases must ensure that data is checked when concurrent access is allowed. Concurrent access means more than one application or thread may be reading or updating the same data at the same time.
• Database Garbage Collection - Garbage collection is the process of destroying objects that are no longer referenced, and freeing the resources those objects used. In Java there is a background process that performs garbage collection. Requires bi-directional object relationships. Determines if the database performs garbage collection on objects that are no longer referenced by the database. This keeps external programs from having to track the use of object pointers.
• DBMS - Database management system.
• Distributed Architecture - Object are sharing in a distributed environment or the entire database may be replicated on multiple computers.
• DML - Data Manipulation Language separate from programming languages (for RDBMS) and used as a means of getting and storing data in the database.
• Encapsulation - Data with method storage. Not all databases support the methods but rely upon the classes defined in the schema to reconstruct the object with its methods.
• Fault tolerance - Features that provide for fault tolerence in the event of a hardware of software failure. Normally transaction processing provides software fault tolerance. Data replication to other servers on the network supports hardware fault tolerance.
• Heterogeneous environment - Cross Platform support - The database may be able to run on various builds of computers and with various operating systems.
• Inheritance - Objects inherit attributes from parent objects.
• JDBC - An application program interface (API). Calls are used to execute SQL operations.
• normalized - Elimination of redundancy in databases so that all columns depend on a primary key.
• Notification - Notification may be active or passive. A passive system can minimally determine if an object has changed state. An active system may provide for an application to be informed when an object is modified.
• Object relationships - Object relationships define association with other objects, and whether objects can detect each other in one direction or two directions. Two way object relationships may allow for garbage collection.
• ODBMS - Object Database management system.
• OQL - Object Query Language, is a data manipulation language for Object Databases although many object databases do not support it. They rely on object class extensions or interfaces for their support.
• Persistence - Databases provide persistance which for object databases means object can be stored between database runs.
• RDBMS - Relational database management system.
• Schema - The data structure of the database.
• SQL - Structured Query Language is a standard language for communication with a relational database management system (RDBMS). Structured Query Language, is a data manipulation language which is a standard for getting and storing data in an RDBMS.
• SQLJ - Supports structured query language (SQL) calls for Java. It consists of a language allowing SQL statements to be embedded in it, a translator, and a runtime model.
• Transaction processing - Some databases may have some form of transaction processing which may support concurrency. Transaction processing will ensure that the entire transaction is made or none of it is made. Transactions support concurrency and data recovery. A data failure will cause a rollback of data