Database Management Systems (DBMS): 25 flashcards
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1. What is a DBMS?
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Software that sits between users/applications and stored data, letting you define, store, retrieve, update, and manage data while enforcing rules automatically.
2. What is a database?
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The organized collection of data itself — the tables and records that a DBMS manages.
3. Name the three levels of DBMS architecture.
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Physical level (disk storage), logical level (tables and relationships), and view level (customized user slices).
4. What is data independence?
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The ability to change physical storage or the logical schema without breaking applications or user views.
5. List the steps of query processing in order.
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Parsing → optimization → execution → transaction management → storage access.
6. What does the query optimizer do?
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It chooses the cheapest execution plan — which index to use and join order — so the same query runs fast.
7. What does ACID stand for?
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Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability.
8. What does Atomicity mean?
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A transaction is all-or-nothing: every operation happens, or none does.
9. What does Isolation guarantee?
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Concurrent transactions do not interfere with each other — two ATMs withdrawing simultaneously don't double-spend.
10. What does Durability guarantee?
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Committed data survives crashes — after 'transfer successful', power loss doesn't erase it.
11. What is normalization and why do it?
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Organizing tables to reduce redundancy and prevent update, insert, and delete anomalies.
12. What does 1NF require?
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Atomic values only — no repeating groups or multi-valued cells.
13. What does 2NF remove?
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Partial dependencies — a non-key attribute depending on only part of a composite key.
14. What does 3NF remove?
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Transitive dependencies — a non-key attribute depending on another non-key attribute.
15. Name the four SQL categories.
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DDL (structure), DML (data), DCL (access control), TCL (transactions).
16. What is a primary key?
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A column (or set of columns) that uniquely identifies each row in a table.
17. What is a foreign key?
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A column in one table that references a primary key in another table, creating a relationship.
18. What is referential integrity?
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A rule preventing orphan records — you cannot enroll a student who doesn't exist.
19. What are the three relationship types?
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One-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many (which needs a junction table).
20. Why do files fail at scale compared to a DBMS?
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Redundancy (data copied everywhere), inconsistency (copies disagree), and no concurrency control (users overwrite each other).
21. What is the difference between a DBMS and a DBA?
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The DBMS is the software tool; the DBA is the human administrator who installs, configures, backs up, tunes, and secures it.
22. Name three examples of relational DBMSs.
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MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.
23. What are NoSQL DBMS types?
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Document stores (MongoDB), key-value stores (Redis), and graph stores (Neo4j).
24. Why is SQL called declarative?
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You say what you want, not how to get it — the DBMS optimizer figures out the how.
25. What does the buffer manager do?
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Caches data pages in RAM so the execution engine can read from memory instead of disk.
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