Separation of Data and Applications
As described in the feature structured data the structure of a database
is described through metadata
which is also
stored in the database.
An application software does not
need any knowledge about the physical data storage like encoding, format,
storage place, etc. It only communicates with the management system of a
database (DBMS) via a standardised interface with the help of a standardised
language like SQL. The access to the data and the metadata is entirely done by
the DBMS.
In this way all the applications can be totally
seperated from the data. Therefore database internal reorganisations or
improvement of efficiency do not have any influence on the application
software.