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In computing, a database is an organized collection of data (also known as a data store) stored and accessed electronically through the use of a database management system. Small databases can be stored on a , while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spans formal techniques and practical considerations, including data modeling, efficient data representation and storage, query languages, security and privacy of sensitive data, and distributed computing issues, including supporting concurrent access and fault tolerance.
A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is expressed in its functioning. Systems are the subjects of study of systems theory and other systems sciences. Systems have several common properties and characteristics, including structure, function(s), behavior and interconnectivity.
In common usage and statistics, data (USˈdætə; UKˈdeɪtə) is a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally. A datum is an individual value in a collection of data. Data is usually organized into structures such as tables that provide additional context and meaning, and which may themselves be used as data in larger structures.
Modern large-scale data platforms manage colossal amount of data, generated by the ever-increasing number of concurrent users. Geo-replicated and sharded key-value data stores play a central role when
Global-scale online services, such as Google’s Web search and Facebook’s social networking, run in large-scale datacenters. Due to their massive scale, these services are designed to scale out (or dis
We are currently witnessing a shift towards the use of high-level programming languages for systems development. These approaches collide with the traditional wisdom which calls for using low-level la