Preview
IB DP Computer Science — A3 Databases — Alternative databases and data warehouses | HL | A3.4.4
📋 What You Will Learn
- Describe what a distributed database is and why organisations distribute data
- Explain why data consistency must be actively maintained across sites
- Explain the role of ACID — and the two-phase commit protocol — in distributed transactions
- Describe the ten features: concurrency control, data consistency, data partitioning, data security, distribution transparency, fault tolerance, global query processing, location transparency, replication, scalability
- Evaluate the trade-offs of distributing a database for a given scenario
📚 Why This Matters A city library system keeps books in many branches, but you search ONE catalogue, and it never matters to you which building holds the book. A distributed database works the same way: data physically lives on many servers in many places, yet users see a single, seamless database — and the hard engineering is keeping every branch's "catalogue" telling the same story.
📖 Definition — Distributed database A database whose data is stored across multiple physical sites (servers or locations) connected