Database

Data repository · Structured storage · Storage system

Tags:data

Examples

Entity-relationship diagram of a book e-commerce domain: entities (Author, Book, Customer, ShoppingBasket) and their relationships with cardinalities.

Description

A component responsible for maintaining an organized collection of information, structured according to a defined model and managed by a specialized system (DBMS). Its purpose is to store, maintain, and make available the data that represents the state of the information system, ensuring its persistence, integrity, security, and availability. It receives information from the inputs, is updated by the autonomous processes, and is queried by the outputs.

Mandatory capabilities

Mandatory capabilities

• Maintains an organized and persistent collection of information
• Defines a logical model that represents entities, attributes, and relationships
• Ensures the integrity and consistency of the data through mechanisms provided by the management system
• Allows access to the information through query languages or programmatic interfaces

Additional capabilities

Additional capabilities

• Replication: keeps synchronized copies of the data on multiple nodes for high availability or geographic distribution
• Automatic backups: generates periodic backups of the content for recovery from failures or data loss
• Schema migrations: allows the structure of the data to evolve without losing information, applying changes in a controlled way
• Indexing: speeds up queries at the cost of additional space by maintaining auxiliary search structures

Boundaries

What it is not

• Its management and operational control are carried out by specialized systems (DBMS), which are not directly part of this component
• Does not define the access policies or permissions on the stored data — that belongs to Authorization
• Does not cover temporary or cache repositories

Information flow

Input

Write operations coming from other components of the system (insertion, update, or deletion of records)

→

Output

Data retrieved in response to read operations; confirmations of the executed write operations

Variants

• Relational database: models data as tables with explicit relationships through keys; based on SQL
• Non-relational database: stores data without a rigid schema (key-value, document, columnar)
• Navigational / graph database: models data as nodes and explicit relationships, optimized for connectivity queries
• Object-oriented database: stores data as objects with attributes and methods, aligned with object-oriented programming paradigms
• Vector database: optimized for storing and searching high-dimensional embeddings, common in AI applications

Typical dependencies

• Database management system (DBMS) that operates the component
• Physical storage mechanisms (local disk, network storage, cloud services)

Mapping to the Digital Board

Manual UpdateNo

Automatic UpdateNo

Data ConceptsAlways

On-Demand OutputsNo

Automatic OutputsNo

Autonomous ProcessesOptional

Section	Relationship	Notes
Manual Update	No	—
Automatic Update	No	—
Data Concepts	Always	The logical model of the database materializes the system's concepts; each entity in the model appears as a concept on the board.
On-Demand Outputs	No	—
Automatic Outputs	No	—
Autonomous Processes	Optional	Autonomous maintenance tasks such as automatic backups, replication, or indexing, when those capabilities are present.

Digital Board example

Manual Update

—

Data Concepts

Book

Customer

Publisher

Author

Order

On-Demand Outputs

—

Automatic Update

—

Autonomous Processes

Automatic Backup

Automatic Outputs

—