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

Published: 15 May 2009

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.

Dig Deeper on Database management system (DBMS) architecture, design and strategy

RDBMS (relational database management system) A relational database management system (RDBMS) is a collection of programs and capabilities that enable IT teams and others to create, update, administer and otherwise interact with a relational database.

database management system (DBMS) A database management system (DBMS) is system software for creating and managing databases.

object-oriented database management system (OODBMS) An object-oriented database management system (OODBMS), sometimes shortened to ODBMS for object database management system, is a database management system (DBMS) that supports the modelling and creation of data as objects.

What is the difference between DBMS and RDBMS? A relational database management system is the most popular type of database management system for business uses. Find out how RDBMS software differs from DBMS technology in general.

Data management: What does the future hold? We explore how firms are replacing transactional database management systems with new database architectures

A transition from Oracle to NoSQL Cassandra Several companies are augmenting their Oracle database workloads with NoSQL Cassandra. Why?

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