Databases

A database is an information technological construct made up out of one or more specially structured data storage devices and a variety of search, sorting and access methods for these data. A database is a structured storage and management system for vast amounts of data.

Database types and database software

Depending on the basic concept there are different types of databases. Not every type of database is suitable for every task. Nowadays the most common type of database are the relational databases and the object-oriented databases.

To set up a database, a database software is required. The software stores and manages the data (or data sets) according to a preferred procedure. Access is granted via a special query language, in which single commands get sent to the database. The most common database language today is SQL. MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft-SQL are examples for commonly used database software.

Document Management Systems and databases

bitfarm-Archiv Document Management, the Open Source DMS with many functions, uses MySQL as a database system.

MySQL excels in high stability and especially in an extremely fast full-text search and measurably surpasses most other databases – including Oracle and MS-SQL. Fast full-text searches are especially important for the Enterprise-Edition of Document Management Systems, to make best use of the outstanding OCR output. Since MySQL is an open-source product, it can be used without licence fees and correspondingly fits perfectly to bitfarm-Archiv Document Management. The documents do not get stored in the database with bitfarm-Archiv DMS incidentally, but rather lie in a separate part of the file system, so the the database remains fairly small. This allows for a high scalability of the entire system.

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