数据库系统概念(杨冬青)习题答案Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the nature and purpose of database systems. The most important concept in this chapter is that database systems allow data to be treated at a high level of abstraction. Thus, database systems differsignificantly from the file systemsand general purpose programming environments with which students are already familiar. Another important aspect of the chapter is to provide motivation for the use of database systems as opposed to application programs built on top of file systems. Thus, the chapter motivates what the student will be studying in the rest of the course. The idea of abstraction in database systems deserves emphasis throughout, not just in discussion of Section 1.3. The overview of the structure of databases is, of necessity, rather brief, and is meant only to give the student a rough idea of some of the concepts. The student may not initially be able to fully appreciate the concepts described here, but should be able to do so by the end of the course. The specifics of the E-R, relational, and object-oriented models are covered in later chapters. These models can be used in Chapter 1 to reinforce the concept of abstraction, with syntactic details deferred to later in the course. If students have already had a course in operating systems, it is worthwhile to point out how the OS and DBMS are related. It is useful also to differentiate between concurrency as it is taught in operating systems courses (with an orientation towardsfiles, processes,and physical resources)and database concurrency control (with an orientation towards granularity finer than the file level, recoverable transactions, and resources accessed associatively rather than physically). If students are familiar with a particular operating system, that OS’s approach to concurrent file access may be used for illustration.
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