Database Servers

Database management systems (DBMS) can be divided into three primary components: development tools, user interface, and database engine. The database engine does all the selecting, sorting, and updating. Currently, most DBMS combine the interface and engine on each user's computer. Database servers split these two functions, allowing the user interface software to run on each user's PC (the client), and running the database engine in a separate machine (the database server) shared by all users. This approach can increase database performance as well as overall LAN performance because only selected records are transmitted to the user's PC, not large blocks of files. However, because the database engine must handle multiple requests,the database server itself can become a bottleneck when a large number of requests are pending.