Data Access

Data Access refers to a user's ability to access or retrieve data stored within a database or other repository. Users who have data access can store, retrieve, move or manipulate stored data, which can be stored on a wide range of hard drives and external devices.

Data access is one of the main outputs of effective data governance programs. Organizations should ideally have well thought out, structured means of granting data access to different users. This is reinforced by various permissions and levels of security required for data access. Frequently, these permissions are based on organizational roles or responsibilities, which are structured according to data governance policies. When data is at rest in a repository, there are two basic ways of accessing it: with sequential access and random access:

• Sequential access uses a seek operation to move the different data on a disk until the requested data is found. However, each data segment is read (in sequential order) until the sought after data is found, which can tax computational resources. Still, this method is often faster than random access because it requires fewer seek procedures than random access does.
• Random access stores or retrieves data from anywhere on the disk. The advantage of this approach is that not all data has to be read in sequential order to find what a user’s looking for. Also, the data is located in constant time, which means there’s an upper limit to how long it will take for it to be retrieved. When that limit is less than how long it could take to sequentially read and retrieve data, random access is preferable.

See Also

Data Access
Data Analysis
Data Analytics
Data Architecture
Data Asset Framework (DAF)
Data Buffer
Data Center
Data Center Infrastructure
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
Data Cleansing
Data Collection
Data Compatibility
Data Consolidation
Data Deduplication
Data Delivery Platform (DDP)
Data Description (Definition) Language (DDL)
Data Dictionary
Data Discovery
Data Driven Organization
Data Element
Data Enrichment
Data Entry
Data Federation
Data Flow Diagram
Data Governance
Data Health Check
Data Hierarchy
Data Independence
Data Integration
Data Integration Framework (DIF)
Data Integrity
Data Island
Data Item
Data Lake
Data Life Cycle
Data Lineage
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Data Management
Data Migration
Data Minimization
Data Mining
Data Model
Data Modeling
Data Monitoring
Data Munging
Data Portability
Data Preparation
Data Presentation Architecture
Data Processing
Data Profiling
Data Proliferation
Data Propagation
Data Protection Act
Data Prototyping
Data Quality
Data Quality Assessment (DQA)
Data Quality Dimension
Data Quality Standard
Data Reconciliation
Data Reference Model (DRM)
Data Science
Data Security
Data Stewardship
Data Structure
Data Structure Diagram
Data Suppression
Data Transformation
Data Validation
Data Value Chain
Data Vault Modeling
Data Virtualization
Data Visualization
Data Warehouse
Data Wrangling
Data and Information Reference Model (DRM)
Data as a Service (DaaS)
Database (DB)
Database Design
Database Design Methodology
Database Management System (DBMS)
Database Marketing
Database Schema
Database System