View level.The highest level of abstaction describes only part of the entire database. Even though the logical level users simpler structures, complexity remains because of the variety of information stored in a large database. Many users of the database system do not need all this information; instead, they need access only a part of the database. The view level of abstraction exists to simplify their interaction with view the system. The system may provide many views for the same database.
Figure 1.1 shows the relationship among the three levels of abstaction.
An analogy to the concept of data types in programming languages may clarify the distinction among levels of abstraction. Most high-level programming languages support the notion of a record type. For example,in a pascal-like languages, we may declare a record as follows:
type customer = record
customer-id: string ;
customer-name: sting;
customer-street: string;
customer-city: string;
end;
This code defines a new record type called customer with four fieldas. Each field has a name and a type associated with it. A banking enterprise may have several such record types,including
- account,with fields account-number and balance
- employee,with fields employee-name and salary
At the physical level,a customer,account,or employee record can be described as a block of consecutive storage locations(for example, words or bytes). The language