Databases in the Workplace

Databases in the Work Place

We are in the information age and the effective management of data is paramount in almost all aspects of our life. All businesses today thrive on the availability of vast pool of data pertaining to their domain and thus databases constitute an indispensable aspect of all businesses. Having access to a huge database and the intelligent interpretation of the data therein holds the key to business success. I am working as a database engineer for "Intelligent Email Solutions," a company which specializes in offering email based intelligent customer relationship management solutions. Let us have a brief overview of the use and the importance of databases in our company.

Database

Our clientele are big corporations like Nike, Citibank, ANZ Grindlays, Jc penny etc. We provide automated email-based customer relationship management using our novel 'semantic engine' which scans through thousands of customer emails and categorizes them and routes them back to the respective departments of our clients. This automatic categorizing greatly reduces the time the customer care staffs (at our client's office) have to spend if they had to manually read and check over the mails. Databases are therefore at the core of all the information processing activities in our company. We use Oracle 8 as the backend and Visual Basic as the front end. We have different departments that need to access the data stored in the databases and to accomplish this we have integrated the oracle database with Lotus notes thus enabling concurrent data access for different groups. Since we use Oracle as the database system in our organization let us briefly discuss some of the functional aspects of the oracle RDBMS.

Oracle Database

Oracle is a comprehensive relational database management system which is flexible and at the same time highly functional. Further we preferred Oracle because it is portable, compatible as well as it easily integrates with a variety of software and hardware platforms. It can also be configured in different ways to suit the requirements of any project. Along with all these features and the cross functional connectivity, Oracle is also endowed with the following specialized tools, very easy and highly interactive developer tool in SQL* Forms, which greatly reduces the time and effort needed for an application creation process.

Conversion of files in different formats into the standard oracle table format is made possible by the SQL* Loader tool.

The report generator feature, which creates reports instantly using the supplied information.

4) Finally but most importantly it is the oracle connectivity feature (SQl*Net) with its interfacing capability with a variety of software, that made Oracle an ideal choice for our company.

The Oracle distributed database feature is important for us because we work in a setup where the same database will be accessed by multiple instances. Another feature of Oracle is the scalability of the database. An important concern for us is that the performance of the whole 'Semantic engine' system should not be dragged down because of the huge volume of the incoming emails from our clients. Categorizing and storing these thousands of emails in the proper database structure would require high scalability on the part of the database system. Another feature in favor of oracle is its Muti- threaded architecture, which optimizes the performance based on the workload. Last but not the least is the security feature of oracle database. Security of the information is important for us as we are dealing with confidential information of our clients. While the security at the network level is taken care of by the Lotus notes (groupware software) built in security features, Oracle also provides extensive security features that limit and restrict data access.

Security Features of Oracle

Each and every user in our company is granted specific database privileges which restrict his/her level of access to information contained in the database. The lock feature of the oracle multi-user database system avoids the possibility of a deadlock situation from arising during concurrent data access. The record level lock feature is another example of Oracle's highly sophisticated concurrency control mechanism. Table definition lock, Exclusive lock, Share update lock, etc. are some other options by which we can restrict data access at different levels.