August 2009
Intermediate to advanced
893 pages
26h 48m
English
Content preview from Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications
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20.1. Introduction
The operational database systems that we discussed in the previous chapters have been traditionally designed to meet mission-critical requirements for online transaction processing and batch processing. These systems attempted to automate the established business processes by leveraging the power of computers to obtain significant improvements in efficiency and speed. However, in today’s business environment, efficiency or speed is not the only key for competitiveness.
Today, multinational companies and large organisations have operations in many places within their origin country and other parts of the world. Each place of operation may generate large volume of data. For example, insurance companies may have data from thousands ...