DATABASE SYSTEMS

Objectives

 Three Level Database Architecture

 Contents of External, Conceptual and Internal levels
 Purpose of External/Conceptual and Conceptual/Internal Mappings
 Logical & Physical Data Independence
ANSI-SPARC Three Level Architecture
 An early proposal for a standard terminology and general architecture for
database systems was produced in 1971 by the Data Base Task Group (DBTG).

 The DBTG recognized the need for a two-level approach:

 A system view called the schema and
 user views called subschemas.

 The ANSI-SPARC architecture recognized the need for a three-level approach with
a system catalog.
 The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Standards Planning and
Requirements Committee (SPARC), produced a similar terminology and
architecture in 1975 (ANSI, 1975).
ANSI-SPARC Three Level Architecture
 ANSI-SPARC provides three levels of abstraction, that is, three distinct levels at
which data items can be described.
 These levels form a three-level architecture comprising an external, a conceptual,
and an internal level.

 External Level: The way users perceive the data is called the external level.

 Internal Level: The way the DBMS and the operating system perceive the data is the internal
level, where the data is actually stored using the data structures and file organizations.

 Conceptual level / Logical Level: provides both the mapping and the desired independence
between the external and internal levels.
ANSI-SPARC Three Level Architecture
Objectives of Three Level ANSI-SPARC Architecture
1. Each user should be able to access the same data, but have a different
customized view of the data.

2. Users should not have to deal directly with physical database storage details, such
as indexing or hashing. In other words, a user’s interaction with the database
should be independent of storage considerations.

3. The DBA should be able to change the database storage structures without
affecting the users’ views.

4. The internal structure of the database should be unaffected by changes to the

physical aspects of storage, such as the changeover to a new storage device.

5. The DBA should be able to change the conceptual structure of the database
without affecting all users.
External Level
 Users’ view of the database
 Describes that part of database that is relevant to a particular user
 Different views may have different representation of same data (e.g.
different date formats, age derived from DOB etc.)

 This level describes the user interaction with database system.

Conceptual Level
 Community view of the database
 Describes what data is stored in database and relationships among the data
 This level contains the logical structure of the entire database as seen by the
DBA.

 The conceptual level represents:

• all entities, their attributes, and their relationships;
• the constraints on the data;
• semantic information about the data;
• security and integrity information.
Conceptual Level contd…

 The conceptual level supports each external view, in that any data available
to a user must be contained in, or derivable from, the conceptual level.
 However, this level must not contain any storage-dependent details.
 For instance, the description of an entity should contain only data types of
attributes (for example, integer, real, character) and their length (such as the
maximum number of digits or characters), but not any storage considerations,
such as the number of bytes occupied.
Internal Level
 The physical representation of the database on the computer.
 This level describes how the data is stored in the database.
 The internal level covers the physical implementation of the database to achieve
optimal runtime performance and storage space utilization.
 It covers the data structures and file organizations used to store data on storage
devices.
Internal Level contd…
 It interfaces with the operating system access methods (file management techniques
for storing and retrieving data records) to place the data on the storage devices, build
the indexes, retrieve the data, and so on.
 The internal level is concerned with such things as:
• storage space allocation for data and indexes;
• record descriptions for storage (with stored sizes for data items);
• record placement;
• data compression and data encryption techniques.

 Below the internal Level there is a physical level that may be managed by the operating
system under the direction of DBMS.