Levels of Abstraction

A DBMS has 3 levels of abstraction:

1. Physical Level: describes how data is stored in the database

2. Logical/Conceptual Level: describes the data stored in the database and the relationships between the entities

3. View Level: describes how users see the data; this level hides details from the application program and displays only necessary information; there can be multiple views at the view level (as shown below)