Centralised+Database

A Centralized database is a database located and maintained in one location, unlike a distributed database. One main advantage is that all [|data] is located in one place.

We are going to explain how a company uses a centralized database to explain how it works and the benefits of it.

A company would have spreadsheets, word processing documents, and contact details scattered across many databases. A different member of staff would be responsible for maintaining each of these data sources. The amount of duplication across these lists would be astounding. What’s more, each staff member would have his/her own ideas about what information was important for certain projects. One staff member would perhaps have selected nothing more than email addresses. Others staff members may be more thorough by collecting company names, addresses, and phone numbers.

This illustrates the inefficiency associated with not having a centralized database for storing essential data. This type of data is probably the most needed and commonly used data. When it is scattered and fragmented across an organization, it cannot be properly managed or controlled.

Consider the benefits this organization will now experience. By having all contacts in one place, the data is more secure and reliable. It can be backed up on a daily or even hourly basis. Duplicate records are greatly reduced in this environment. The database in many ways becomes a shared source of knowledge. As each staff member makes changes to member’s profile, that information becomes available to everyone in the organization. An accurate and large profile would begin to develop for each of the contacts stored in the database. This would make it easier for managers of a company to keep on top of employee’s activities. Little, if any, of these benefits could have been achieved when the data was previously scattered across the organization.

Modern database software is usually ODBC-compliant. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity, If a database is ODBC-compliant it means that other applications can access the data i.e. any user of the company’s website can query data from the database and this is made easier by all the data being in one place. If the business had it’s data scattered between databases, to get the information on the website, the data would have to be manually entered. In the new model, the data can be pulled directly to the website from the database whenever a visitor requests it. Another advantage of centralized database and the use of ODBC is the ability to integrate email communication with the database between users and staff.

A disadvantage of having a centralized database is that bottlenecks may occur. A bottleneck is a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or multiple components or resources that have a problem, which causes the efficiency of a database to decrease.