Few disadvantages of database management systems

Any system has its own advantages and disadvantages. This very well applies to the database management system too. In a relational database management system many normalization rules are applied to the tables in the database. This makes the queries very slow and it also consumes a lot of memory.

Optimal normalization is a tedious task and it takes a lot of time to work through it. Most of the relational database management systems do not have that problem now-a-days. However inefficient design might lead to such problems.

The database management systems now-a-days are more complex. It needs an expert to do the design.

 

Expert resources are not easy to get and hence it is time consuming when it comes to design. The confidentiality and security of the databases are questionable now-a-days since most of them are exposed to the web. Chances are there that there might be a hack and losing data. Hence the time and money spent on security is every increasing.

 

Hardware and software costs for setting up the database are on the increase. With the sophistication in the tools the cost of the database is also raised. This is not affordable for many medium scale applications.

 

If there is any damage to the database it is going to affect all the applications that are dependent on that database. Hence automatic recovery of data in case of crash is necessary and this is not going to get cheaper day by day. Third party tools for backing up data and for recovering data are necessary if the DBMS does not have suitable tools.

 

The quality of data that is held in the database might get poor when the users have direct access to the database. Some means should be there to control the quality of the data that is getting in the database. The question of data integrity is also there. We are not sure what happens when several users update the same data at the same time. Although there are techniques to check this out, it needs experts to do so.