Question

A corporate business has three major functional areas (HRM, Sales, and Accounts). Each of these functional area is supported by its own specialized database. This architecture produces three major problems: data redundancy, data isolation, and data inconsistency. Explain what each of these three problems mean . Explain why data redundancy very often produces data inconsistency (1 mark). Finally, explain how moving to a single database would introduce data independence into this corporate business (1 mark).

Answer 1

Data redundancy is an analytical issue when the same data is stored in two or more different places. It is a common occurrence in business. It is multiple copies of the same database.
Data isolation: Data isolation is a property that determines the required time and way for brining change in operation that becomes visible to other concurrent users. There is four data isolation; read uncommitted, read committed, repeatable read, and serializable.
Data inconsistency: It is a situation when multiple tables of a database analyses the same data but receive the data from different inputs. Data inconsistency leads to data redundancy.

Data redundancy produces data inconsistency because inputs from different sources of data unnecessarily affect the database. Hence, the information is structured inefficiently in the database that leads to redundancy. Excessive redundancy confuses the database system that leads to data duplication, which is one of the reasons for data inconsistency.
A single database is the only source of data for a business organization. All the centralized data are stored in single data, which expands to other inferior database systems. Each database isolated, portable, and separate from others. All the data has separate tasks and values which encourage data independence.