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What are the benefits and disadvantages of a RDBMS?

Find out about the benefits and disadvantages of RDBMS are and get examples of when relational database management systems are the best database system tools to use in this tip.

Mark Whitehorn

University of Dundee

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What are disadvantages of a RDBMS?

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As a confirmed database freak I'd have to say none. As a reasonable human (hopefully I qualify on both counts) then of course relational database management system (RDBMS) have disadvantages as well as benefits.

A good way to think about RDBMSes is that they are the right tool for some jobs and the wrong for others. So, if you need to store and manipulate transactional data, you need it to be secure and yet allow multiple people to have simultaneous access to it, then an RDBMS is an excellent tool. If you need a word processor, then an RDBMS is going to be sub-optimal.

This was last published in May 2009

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