File System Vs Database Management System

File Based System Vs  Database System

S.No	Points of distinction	File Systems	DBMS
1.	Main memory storage limit	Limited memory to store and hold data.  Secondary storage devices are used to hold data and relevant parts are to be loaded into main memory for processing as needed.	More memory to store and hold data.  Internal  storage mechanisms need not be revealed to the user. Relevant parts of data are automatically loaded into main memory for processing as needed.
2.	Retrieval complexity	A user has to write special programs to answer each question a user may want to ask about data.	Automatic commands and utilities are available to retrieve data.
3.	Searching complexity	Searching complexity is more because of the large volume of data to be searched.	Searching complexity is less because efficient searching technique is adopted by DBMS itself.
4.	Data Inconsistency	The user must protect data from inconsistent changes made by different users while accessing the data concurrently.	Data Integrity is maintained automatically by DBMS itself.
5.	Crash Recovery	The user must ensure that data is restored to a consistent state if the system crashes while changes are being made.	DBMS protects users from the effects of system failures.
6.	Security Mechanism	Operating systems provide only a password mechanism for security for files.  This is not sufficiently flexible  to enforce security policies in which different users have permission to access different subsets of data.	DBMS provides more security measures by centralizing the administration of data when several users share the data .
7.	Volume of data and no of users use	As the volume of data and number of users grow – hundreds of gigabytes of data and thousands of users  file system is complex and unable to manage	As the volume of data and number of users grow – hundreds of gigabytes of data and thousands of users  DBMS is efficient  to manage Corporate databases.

When the user should  not use a DBMS :

• A DBMS should be used only for answering complex queries or handling many concurrent requests.  It is not suitable for certain specialized applications with tight real-time constraints or applications with just a few well-defined critical operations for which efficient custom code must be written.
• An application sometimes may need to manipulate the data in ways that are not supported by the query language.  In such cases, DBMS is not used.  Eg.  Relational databases do not support flexible analysis of text data.
• If specialized performance or data manipulation requirements are central to an application, the application may choose not to use a DBMS.