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Data Abstraction

Data abstraction hides internal database details from users and provides three levels: the physical level describes actual data storage, the logical level describes what data is stored, and the view level describes user interaction. Data abstraction achieves data independence, allowing physical and logical schemas to change without affecting the other levels or user views.

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Shruti Shinde
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17 views

Data Abstraction

Data abstraction hides internal database details from users and provides three levels: the physical level describes actual data storage, the logical level describes what data is stored, and the view level describes user interaction. Data abstraction achieves data independence, allowing physical and logical schemas to change without affecting the other levels or user views.

Uploaded by

Shruti Shinde
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Data abstraction

• Database systems are made-up of complex


data structures. To ease the user interaction
with database, the developers hide internal
irrelevant details from users. This process of
hiding irrelevant details from user is called
data abstraction.
• We have three levels of abstraction:
Physical level: This is the lowest level of data
abstraction. It describes how data is actually
stored in database. You can get the complex
data structure details at this level.
• Logical level: This is the middle level of 3-level
data abstraction architecture. It describes
what data is stored in database.
• View level: Highest level of data abstraction.
This level describes the user interaction with
database system.
• Example: Let’s say we are storing customer
information in a customer table. At physical
level these records can be described as blocks of
storage (bytes, gigabytes, terabytes etc.) in memory.
These details are often hidden from the programmers.
• At the logical level these records can be described as
fields and attributes along with their data types, their
relationship among each other can be logically
implemented. The programmers generally work at this
level because they are aware of such things about
database systems.
• At view level, user just interact with system with the
help of GUI and enter the details at the screen, they
are not aware of how the data is stored and what data
is stored; such details are hidden from them.
• The main purpose of data abstraction is
achieving data independence in order to save
time and cost required when the database is
modified or altered.
We have namely two levels of data
independence arising from these levels of
abstraction :
• Physical level data independence : The ability
to change the physical schema without
changing the logical schema is called physical
data independence.
• For example, a change to the internal schema,
such as using different file organization or
storage structures, storage devices, or
indexing strategy, should be possible without
having to change the conceptual or external
schemas.
• Logical level data independence: It refers
characteristic of being able to modify the
logical schema without affecting the external
schema or application program(user view ).
These changes may include insertion or
deletion of attributes, altering table structures
entities or relationships to the logical schema
etc.

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