Advantages and disadvantages

DDBMS has many advantages. Data is located near the greatest demand site, access is
faster, processing is faster due to several sites spreading out the work load, new sites can
be added quickly and easily, communication is improved, operating costs are reduced, it
is user friendly, there is less danger of a single-point failure, and it has process
independence.
Several reasons why businesses and organizations move to distributed databases include
organizational and economic reasons, reliable and flexible interconnection of existing
database, and the future incremental growth. Companies believe that a decentralized,
distributed data database approach will adapt more naturally with the structure of the
organizations. Distributed database is more suitable solution when several databases
already exist in an organization. In addition, the necessity of performing global
application can be easily performed with distributed database. If an organization grows
by adding new relatively independent organizational units, then the distributed database
approach support a smooth incremental growth.
Data can physically reside nearest to where it is most often accessed, thus providing users
with local control of data that they interact with. This results in local autonomy of the
data allowing users to enforce locally the policies regarding access to their data.
One might want to consider a parallel architecture is to improve reliability and
availability of the data in a scalable system. In a distributed system, with some careful
tact, it is possible to access some, or possibly all of the data in a failure mode if there is
sufficient data replication.
DDBMS also has a few disadvantages. Managing and controlling is complex, there is less
security because data is at so many different sites.
Distributed databases provide more flexible accesses that increase the chance of security
violations since the database can be accessed throughout every site within the network.
For many applications, it is important to provide secure. Present distributed database
systems do not provide adequate mechanisms to meet these objectives. Hence the
solution requires the operation of DDBMS capable of handling multilevel data. Such a
system is also called a multi level security distributed database management systems
(MLS-DDBMS). MLS-DDBMS provides a verification service for users who wish to
share data in the database at different level security. In MLS- DDBMS, every data item in
the database has correlated with one of several classifications or sensitivities.
The ability to ensure the integrity of the database in the presence of unpredictable failures
of both hardware and software components is also an important features of any
distributed database management systems. The integrity of a database is concerned with
its consistency, correctness, validity, and accuracy. The integrity controls must be built
into the structure of software, databases, and involved personnel.

If there are multiple copies of the same data, then this duplicated data introduces
additional complexity in ensuring that all copies are updated for each update. The notion
of concurrency control and recoverability consume much of the research efforts in the
area of distributed database theory. Increasing in reliability and performance is the goal
and not the status quo.