Data & Database Abbreviations
53 abbreviations · part of Technology & Computer Abbreviations
Abbreviations from databases, data engineering and analytics: database types and guarantees (RDBMS, ACID), SQL sublanguages and keys, data pipelines (ETL, ELT, CDC), warehousing and business intelligence (DWH, OLAP, BI) and big-data tools. These terms appear constantly in data-engineering job descriptions, database documentation and analytics platform comparisons.
| Abbreviation | Stands for | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 3NF | Third normal form | A level of database normalization in which every non-key column depends only on the primary key, with no column depending on another non-key column. |
| ACID | Atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability | The four guarantees of reliable database transactions: a transaction happens completely or not at all, leaves data valid, runs as if alone despite concurrent activity… |
| BASE | Basically available, soft state, eventual consistency | A description of the guarantees many distributed NoSQL databases offer instead of ACID: the system stays available, data may change over time as replicas sync, and… |
| BI | Business intelligence | Technologies and practices for collecting, integrating, analyzing and presenting business data so managers can make better decisions, typically through dashboards… |
| BLOB | Binary large object | A database data type for storing large chunks of binary data, such as images, audio, PDFs or serialized files, in a single column. |
| BSON | Binary JSON | The binary serialization format MongoDB uses to store documents and send them over the network. |
| CAP | Consistency, availability, partition tolerance (CAP theorem) | The principle that a distributed data system cannot guarantee consistency, availability and partition tolerance all at once: when a network partition splits the nodes… |
| CDC | Change data capture | A technique that detects inserts, updates and deletes in a source database and streams them to other systems in near real time, usually by reading the database's… |
| CTE | Common table expression | A named temporary result set defined with a WITH clause at the start of a SQL query, which makes complex queries easier to read and allows recursive queries over… |
| DAG | Directed acyclic graph | A graph whose edges have a direction and contain no cycles, used to model tasks that must run in dependency order. |
| DAX | Data Analysis Expressions | The formula and query language of Microsoft Power BI, Analysis Services and Power Pivot for Excel, used to define calculated columns and measures such as year-to-date… |
| DB | Database | An organized collection of data stored electronically and managed by software so it can be queried, updated and kept consistent. |
| DBA | Database administrator | The IT professional responsible for installing, configuring, securing, backing up, tuning and monitoring an organization's databases. |
| DBMS | Database management system | Software that creates, stores, secures and retrieves data in databases, handling queries, transactions, concurrency, backups and user permissions. |
| dbt | data build tool | An open-source tool that lets analysts and engineers transform data inside a warehouse by writing SQL SELECT statements as version-controlled models, with dependencies… |
| DDL | Data definition language | The subset of SQL that defines and changes database structure, with statements such as CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, DROP and CREATE INDEX. |
| DML | Data manipulation language | The subset of SQL that reads and changes the data inside tables, using SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE. |
| DS | Data science | The field that combines statistics, programming and domain knowledge to extract insights and build predictive models from data. |
| DWH | Data warehouse | A central repository that integrates historical data from many business systems, structured for reporting and analysis rather than day-to-day transactions. |
| EDA | Exploratory data analysis | The first stage of a data analysis, in which analysts summarize and visualize a dataset with statistics, histograms, scatter plots and correlations to understand its… |
| EDW | Enterprise data warehouse | A data warehouse serving an entire organization, consolidating data from every department into one governed source for company-wide reporting. |
| ELK | Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana | A popular stack for collecting, searching and visualizing logs: Logstash ingests and transforms log data, Elasticsearch indexes it for fast search, and Kibana provides… |
| ELT | Extract, load, transform | A data pipeline approach that loads raw data into a powerful cloud warehouse first and transforms it there with SQL, instead of transforming it beforehand. |
| ERD | Entity-relationship diagram | A diagram showing the entities in a database design, such as Customer, Order and Product, along with their attributes and the relationships and cardinalities between… |
| ETL | Extract, transform, load | The process of copying data from source systems, cleaning and reshaping it, and loading it into a data warehouse or other target. |
| FK | Foreign key | A column in one table that refers to the primary key of another, linking related rows, such as each order's customer_id. |
| HDFS | Hadoop Distributed File System | The storage layer of Apache Hadoop, which splits large files into blocks, typically 128 MB, and replicates each block across several commodity servers for fault… |
| JDBC | Java Database Connectivity | The standard Java API for connecting to relational databases and executing SQL, with a driver supplied by each database vendor. |
| KV | Key-value (store) | A data model or database that stores values under unique keys and retrieves them by key, like a giant dictionary. |
| MDM | Master data management | The discipline and software for creating one consistent, governed version of an organization's core entities, such as customers, products, suppliers and locations… |
| MPP | Massively parallel processing | An architecture in which many independent nodes, each with its own CPU, memory and storage, work on parts of a query at the same time. |
| MSSQL | Microsoft SQL Server | Microsoft's relational database management system, widely used in corporate and Windows-based environments and available on Linux since the 2017 release. |
| MVCC | Multiversion concurrency control | A concurrency method in which a database keeps several versions of each row, so readers see a consistent snapshot while writers create new versions, and reads and… |
| ODBC | Open Database Connectivity | A standard API that lets applications reach many different databases through drivers, so the same program can query SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL or even spreadsheets… |
| ODS | Operational data store | A database that integrates current, frequently updated data from several operational systems for near-real-time reporting and lookups, without the long history of a… |
| OLAP | Online analytical processing | Software and techniques for fast multidimensional analysis of large datasets, such as slicing sales by region, product and month. |
| OLTP | Online transaction processing | Database workloads made of many short, concurrent transactions that insert and update individual records, such as orders, payments, bookings and stock movements. |
| PK | Primary key | A column or set of columns whose values uniquely identify each row in a database table; it can be neither null nor duplicated. |
| PL/SQL | Procedural Language/SQL | Oracle's procedural extension to SQL, adding variables, loops, conditionals, exception handling and packages, used to write stored procedures, functions and triggers… |
| QPS | Queries per second | A throughput measure counting how many requests or database queries a system handles each second. |
| RDBMS | Relational database management system | A database system that stores data in tables linked by keys and queried with SQL, enforcing data types, constraints and transactions. |
| RDF | Resource Description Framework | A W3C standard for describing information as subject-predicate-object triples, such as Paris, capital of, France, so data from different sources can be linked into a… |
| SAS | Statistical Analysis System | A commercial software suite for statistics, data management and analytics, long standard in pharmaceutical trials, banking, insurance and government. |
| SCD | Slowly changing dimension | A data-warehousing technique for handling dimension attributes that change over time, such as a customer's address. |
| SOR | System of record | The authoritative system for a particular kind of data, such as the HR system for employee records or the core banking system for account balances. |
| SPSS | Statistical Package for the Social Sciences | Statistical software, now sold by IBM as SPSS Statistics, offering menu-driven analyses such as t-tests, regression, ANOVA and survey crosstabs. |
| SSIS | SQL Server Integration Services | Microsoft's ETL platform, included with SQL Server, for building data integration packages that extract, transform and load data between databases, files and… |
| SSOT | Single source of truth | The practice of storing each piece of data or definition in one authoritative place that everything else references, so reports and systems never disagree about, for… |
| T-SQL | Transact-SQL | The proprietary SQL dialect of Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL, and originally of Sybase, adding variables, control flow, TRY...CATCH error handling and stored… |
| TPS | Transactions per second | A throughput measure counting how many transactions a database, payment network or blockchain completes each second. |
| TSDB | Time series database | A database optimized for timestamped data points, such as server metrics, sensor readings and stock prices, with fast ingestion, compression and time-based queries like… |
| UDF | User-defined function | A function written by a database or data-platform user, in SQL or another language, and then called inside queries like a built-in function. |
| WAL | Write-ahead logging | A durability technique in which a database records every change in an append-only log on disk before applying it to the data files, so committed transactions can be… |
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