Regardless of the size or the type of your organisation, your organisation most probably has a database to handle your organisation’s data storage needs. Your database is critical to the day-to-day operations of your information management systems because it acts as the repository for everyone’s data. This makes it all the more important to have a database server that will allow employees, customers and management to access and manipulate the appropriate sets of data.
What are Database Servers?
In a nutshell, database servers act as the interface between the actual database and the programs or people that need to access the data that the database holds. The larger your company, the more sophisticated your database server needs to be because of all the extra duties it will perform.
Database servers don’t just allow users to access the data in your databases. They also disallow users from accessing certain sets of data, in that database servers are the ones that enforce permissions and limit what data certain users can view and manipulate. It also allows users to access the database from several different computers and using different clients and programs.
Why are Database Servers So Important?
Database servers are practically what allow your staff, your management and your clients to access the contents of the database. After all, what use is a great repository of information if no one were able to access it?
Its second importance is as a regulator. Remember that one of the goals of information management is getting the right information to the right people at the right place at the right time. With its functions of indexing for better searching, enforcing permissions (effectively limiting who can access which sets of data) and facilitating access to the database from different computers and programs, it’s a critical piece of information management equipment that your database cannot go without.
The Benefits of Using a Database Server
Aside from all its functions that are necessary to your daily information management needs, data servers offer a whole host of benefits that might just convince even a non-technical organisation to get a database server for themselves.
Database servers do all the complicated and processor-intensive stuff – indexing, searching, data analysis and sorting, among others – on the server side, so only a single query needs to go from the client side in order to receive a response from the server. This increases productivity and reduces the bandwidth needed for daily operations, especially in a networked office. Your investment in powerful computers (which is, incidentally, a big expense) is also limited to the sever hardware itself.
Database servers process all the data that passes through them. That means compressing, indexing or otherwise optimising the data that go in and out of the database. This feature makes for a more organised database (thus maximising the storage space) and more optimised returns to queries from the client side. It ensures that the client side gets only the data needed or requested, so the lines aren’t cluttered up unnecessarily.