6.3. Reliability and Integrity

Databases amalgamate data from many sources, and users expect a DBMS to provide access to the data in a reliable way. When software engineers say that software is reliable, they mean that the software runs for very long periods of time without failing. Users certainly expect a DBMS to be reliable, since the data usually are key to business or organizational needs. Moreover, users entrust their data to a DBMS and rightly expect it to protect the data from loss or damage. Concerns for reliability and integrity are general security issues, but they are more highly apparent with databases.

There are several ways that a DBMS guards against loss or damage, and we study them in this section. However, the controls we consider ...

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