Things you will get from this blog post 🤷🏻
If you are looking for a short and sweet introduction to 2 tier and 3 tier architecture in database management system , then let me tell you are at the right place because in this blog post you will get to know about the following things ,
- 2 tier architecture and its major advantage because of which it was widely popular before introduction of 3 tier architecture ❓
- What is 3 tier architecture and what was the reason behind the shift from 2 tier architecture to 3 tier architecture ❓
So without any further due let's jump straight into the content
What is 2 tier architecture ?
2 tier architecture is just a client server architecture which is having 2 layers ( tier ) client layer and data tier . The client tier includes the interface which helps the end user to communicate with the data stored in the data tier, whereas the processing of the query made from the client machine happens in the data tier .
Why we need to process the queries made by client machine ?
The answer to this question is that when the end user from the client machine make any query or in other words we can say when the end user from client machine write any application program , then that application program could be in any of the following high level language [ C++ , java , SQL ] thus first the high level language is needed to be encoded or we can say first it need to be processed so that database management system could actually understand the instructions given in the query .
In addition to it the processing of query is also done in order to check the validity of that query that whether the data which the user is demanding is valid or not .
Why 2 tier architecture was widely used before 3 tier architecture ?
The main reason , of 2 tier architecture being widely used before 3 tier architecture was the simplicity of the architecture , because of which it was very much easy to maintain both the layers in the 2 tier architecture system .
What is 3 tier architecture ?
3 tier architecture is an advanced version of 2 tier archtiecture because of the introduction of another layer known as business layer between the client layer and data layer . Now because of the introduction of one new layer the processing of the query ( which included the conversion of high level language to machine language ) started getting done in the business layer itself due to which the overall executions of operations on the data stored in the database increased significantly because now the dbms itself doesn't have to process and provide the data itself , instead there was a helping hand
If we had 2 tier architecture why we introduced 3 tier architecture ?
The main reason behind the introduction of 3 tier architecture was to hide the 2 disadvantages of 2 tier architecture which are mentioned below :
- Scalability: The 2 tier architecture worked perfectly when the total number of clients or client machine were limited, but when the number increased individuals started experiencing some loss in the data integrity and the reason behind it was that when the total number of clients increased then the total number of queries also increased and since the application process in 2 tier architecture is present in the data tier itself, thus the database management system itself had to do processing query and itself had to provide the data and because of the increase in the load on the data tier sometimes users experienced some loss in the data integrity
- Security: The security of data stored in the database in case of 2 tier architecture was not secured because of the direct the communication between the user and the data, thus the 3 tier architecture got introduced in order to increase the security by introducing a business layer in between which not only made the execution of operations on data efficient but also acted as a layer to make the data more secure by breaking the direct communication between the user and the data in database