Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications

21.1. Introduction

In the preceding chapters of the book, we have discussed a variety of issues related to databases, such as the basic concepts, architecture and organisation, design, query and transaction processing, security and other database management issues. We also covered other advanced data management systems in chapters 15 to 20, such as object-oriented databases, distributed and parallel databases, data warehousing and data mining and so on that provide very large databases and tools for decision support process.

Thus, for most of the history of databases, the types of data stored in the databases were relatively simple. In the past few years, however, there has been an increasing need for handling new data types in databases, such ...