What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of DBMS?

Data is ubiquitous. When you talk about any business, industry, or domain, you’ll see a lot of data that needs to be stored and analyzed for better decision-making. For this purpose, companies used File Management Systems to store data in the past. However, these systems were slow, lacked security, and had a lot of data redundancy issues. To solve these problems, Charles W. Bachman designed the Integrated Database System, the 'first' DBMS, in the year 1960.

Do you know? In the present day, 328.77 million terabytes of data is created each day.

Let’s see the technical definition of a DBMS.

DBMS stands for Database Management System. Basically, DBMS is software that is used to store data where the users can perform operations such as insertion, deletion, selection of data values, etc.

Some of the DBMS examples include:

MySQL
PostgreSQL
FileMaker
Oracle
Microsoft Access
SQL Server

Applications of DBMS

Domain	Application
E-commerce	E-commerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart, etc., have a DBMS of their customers. They have a track of orders sold, orders returned, defective pieces, etc.
Education	Schools have databases of their students. With the rise of online classes, physical attendance registers are being replaced by DBMS.
Reservation Systems	The Train Ticket Reservation System is one of the important examples. It has a database of lakhs and crores of customers. The information status can also be indicated as Waiting, confirmed, or RAC. Not to forget to mention that the waiting status also gets updated because of DBMS!
Manufacturing Industry	DBMS is used to keep records of all the details about the products like quantity, bills, purchase, supply chain management, etc.

Now, we will see the advantages and disadvantages of DBMS, so that we can understand how important it is to use DBMS in today’s world.

Advantages of DBMS

DBMS has a wide variety of advantages that make it very desirable for a myriad of companies. These include:

1. Improved data security

Data security measures are very important for any organization. To ensure high data security, companies use DBMS as it provides various levels of security authentication which can be done at the user and admin levels. This helps to avoid security breaches and takes care of the security issues.

2. Data retrieval

DBMS provides a platform that is time-saving and easy to use for organizations. Data can be stored and retrieved quickly and securely within time constraints.

3. Minimum data inconsistency

Data inconsistency occurs when there are different versions of the same data stored at different places. For example, data inconsistency exists when let’s say a school’s database has the name of the Principal as 'Raman Desai' at one place and it’s 'Naman Desai' at the other place. Here, there’s an inconsistency as the principal is the same and it should be the same at all places in a database. Such errors are highly minimized in a properly designed DBMS.

4. Improved decision making

DBMS provides high data quality by minimizing data inconsistency and improving data security. This ensures that there are fewer errors and high accuracy rate is maintained. Thus, DBMS helps businesses to improve upon their decisions that are backed by the data in a DBMS.

5. Better data sharing facility

DBMS ensures that database users have access to the data. They can see the data and the changes happening in that data. Then, the end-users can also respond quickly to such updates in the database.

6. Improved data integration

DBMS gives companies an integrated view of their organization’s operations and departments. It helps companies to see how one segment of their company is affecting the other one.

7. Good data back-up

Imagine yourself working on an important task, and suddenly the system crashes. How would you feel? Obviously, you’ll get angry and irritated. In the case of organizations, they can’t afford such errors. So, in such cases, DBMS comes to their rescue by enabling data recovery and backup.

Disadvantages of DBMS

Apart from the advantages, there are a few demerits of using DBMS. Let’s have a look at some of the important ones:

1. DBMS is expensive

DBMS requires highly professional staff, sophisticated hardware and software that makes it quite expensive to implement and maintain. Also, training costs for staff and licensing costs are significant ones that add to the total cost of DBMS operations. Thus, heavy investment in database technology results in DBMS being expensive.

2. Complexity issues

DBMS is very complex to operate and manage. It requires skilled personnel to maintain, so it’s difficult for non-technical people to understand its working. If one doesn’t use DBMS properly, then there can be system failure issues. These issues can lead to database failure or data loss.

3. Not beneficial for small firms

DBMS is designed to be useful for large organizations. Generally, traditional file systems work better for small-scale firms as compared to DBMS. This is because the performance of DBMS is slow for small firms. Also, it’s quite expensive for them to use DBMS.

4. Frequent upgrade issue

As updates occur in a system, new features are added to its functionality. This makes it necessary for staff to learn about these software and hardware upgrades. As in today’s world, changes occur rapidly, so it takes time, effort, and cost for organizations to train their staff.

Online resources for DBMS

There are a variety of resources available online for DBMS preparation. We are giving you a list of few popular ones in no particular order.

Online resource type	Resource Name
YouTube Channel	Gate Smashers
	Neso Academy
	Jenny's lectures
	Knowledge Gate
Certification Platforms	Coursera
	edX
	Udemy
Books	Fundamentals of Database Systems - Elmasari, Navathe
	Database Management Systems By Raghu Ramakrishnan, Gehrke
	Database System Concepts by Abraham Silberschatz and S Sudarshan

DBMS helps organizations by providing data sharing and data backup facilities. These advantages come at the expense of cost and complexity. But, for large organizations, these limitations are not problematic as they have highly trained staff and a high budget.