Advantages and Disadvantages of Database Systems

• Improved Data Integrity: Database integrity provides the validity and consistency of store data. Integrity is usually expressed in terms of constraints, which are consistency rules that the database is not permitted to violate
• Economy of Scale: Cost savings can be obtained by combining all organization’s operational data into one database with applications to work on one source of data
• Balance of Conflicting Requirements: By having a structural design in the database, the conflicts between users or departments can be resolved. Decisions will be based on the use of resources for the organization as a whole rather than for an individual entity
• Improved Data Accessibility and Responsiveness: By having an integration in the database approach, data accessing can be crossed departmental boundaries. This feature provides more functionality and better services to users
• Increased Productivity: The database approach provides all the low-level file-handling routines. The provision of these functions allows the programmer to concentrate more on the specific functionality required by the users
• Improved Maintenance: Database approach provides a data independence. As a change of data structure in the database will not affect the application program, it simplifies database application maintenance
• Increased Concurrency: Database can manage concurrent or simultaneous data access effectively. It ensures that here is no interference between users and that would not result any loss of information nor loss of integrity
• Improved Backing and Recovery Services: Modern database management system provides facilities to minimize the amount of processing that can be lost following a failure by using the transaction approach
• Complexity: Database management system is an extremely complex piece of software. All parties must be familiar with its functionality and take full advantage of it. Therefore, training for the administrators, designers and users is required
• Cost of DBMS: A multi-user database management system may be very expensive. Even after the installation, there is a high recurrent annual maintenance cost on the software
• Cost of Conversion: When moving from a file-base system to a database system, the company is required to have additional expenses on hardware acquisition and training cost