Physical Database

Physical Database
• Lowest level of database
• Consists of magnetic spots on magnetic
disks.
• The other levels of the database are
abstract representations of the physical
level. (user view, conceptual view, and
internal view)
 Relational Database
Edgar Codd originally proposed the principles of the
relational model in the late 1960s. The formal model
has its foundations in relational algebra and set
theory, which provide the theoretical basis for most
of the data manipulation operations used.

A software system used to maintain relational

databases is a relational database management
system (RDBMS). Virtually all relational database
systems use SQL (Structured Query Language) for
querying and maintaining the database.
The important feature of relational
database management system is
that single database can be spread
across several tables.
Accordingly, a system is relational
if it:

• Represents data in the form of two

dimensional tables.

• Supports the relational algebra functions

of restrict, project, and join.
Three algebra functions
• Restrict: Extracts specified rows from a
specified table, creating a virtual table that
is a subset of the original table.
• Project: Extracts attributes (columns)
from a table to create a virtual table.
• Join: Builds a new physical table from two
tables consisting of all concentrated pairs
of rows, from each table.
• Entity- is anything about which the
organization wishes to capture data.

Physical:
 Inventories
 Customers
 Employees
Conceptual:
 Sales to customer
 Accounts receivable
 Accounts payable
• Occurrence- is used to describe the
number of instances or records that
pertain to specific entity.

• Attributes- are data elements that define

an entity.