Database application development
Relational databases are specialist components of larger systems. They rarely stand on their own and are much more often incorporated into applications. The overall application benefits from the characteristics of relational databases:
- Support for multiple concurrent users
- Fine-grained access rights model
- Secure and reliable backup facilities
- Portability across multiple platforms (DBMS and operating systems)
There are different ways that databases can be used to provide specialist data handling capabilities. At one end of the scale are traditional programs built with java or C# for example where connections and operations are built into the code and compiled. At the other end of the scale are loosely-coupled applications in which an end user may use tools such as Excel to access relational data.
UML 2 Class Diagrams: An Agile Introduction