6Database applications

• 6.1Distributed databases and replication

  Covers horizontal partitioning and vertical partitioning for distributing data across sites, replication (synchronous replication, asynchronous replication) for duplicating data, the six transparencies that realize distribution transparency, sharding for scale-out, and the CAP theorem, BASE, and eventual consistency that describe the limits of distributed systems.

• 6.2Data warehouses and analytics platforms

  Covers star schema and snowflake schema (fact tables, dimension tables) optimized for analytics, ETL and ELT for integrating data into an analytics platform, OLAP (drill-down, roll-up, slice and dice) for multidimensional analysis, data mining for pattern discovery, and big data/data lakes for handling large volumes of data.

• 6.3Database reliability and security

  Covers backups (full/differential/incremental) and recovery protecting data from failures, RAID guarding against disk failure, hot standby improving availability, access control (GRANT/REVOKE) governing privileges, encryption (TDE) protecting confidentiality, audit logging ensuring traceability, and countermeasures against SQL injection, a representative application-layer threat.