SLIDE 1IS 257 – Spring 2004 Database Applications and Introduction to ColdFusion and PHP University of California, Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems SIMS 257: Database Management

SLIDE 2IS 257 – Spring 2004 Lecture Outline Review –Databases for Web Applications – Overview ColdFusion PHP and ASP DiveShop in ColdFusion

SLIDE 3IS 257 – Spring 2004 Why Use a Database System? Database systems have concentrated on providing solutions for all of these issues for scaling up Web applications –Performance –Scalability –Maintenance –Data Integrity –Transaction support While systems differ in their support, most offer some support for all of these.

SLIDE 4IS 257 – Spring 2004 Dynamic Web Applications 2 Server database CGI DBMS Web Server Internet Files Clients database

SLIDE 5IS 257 – Spring 2004 Server Interfaces Adapted from John P Ashenfelter, Choosing a Database for Your Web Site DatabaseWeb Server Web Application Server Web DB App HTML JavaScript DHTML CGI Web Server API’s ColdFusion PhP Perl Java ASP SQL ODBC Native DB interfaces JDBC Native DB Interfaces

SLIDE 6IS 257 – Spring 2004 What Database systems are available? Choices depend on: –Size (current and projected) of the application –Hardware and OS Platforms to be used in the application –Features required E.g.: SQL? Upgrade path? Full-text indexing? Attribute size limitations? Locking protocols? Direct Web Server access? Security? –Staff support for DBA, etc. –Programming support (or lack thereof) –Cost/complexity of administration –Budget

SLIDE 7IS 257 – Spring 2004 Desktop Database Systems Individuals or very small enterprises can create DBMS-enabled Web applications relatively inexpensively Some systems will require an application server (such as ColdFusion) to provide the access path between the Web server and the DBMS

SLIDE 8IS 257 – Spring 2004 Pros and Cons of Database Options Desktop databases –usually simple to set up and administer –inexpensive –often will not scale to a very large number of users or very large database size –May lack locking management appropriate for multiuser access –Poor handling for full-text search –Well supported by application software (Coldfusion, PHP, etc.)

SLIDE 9IS 257 – Spring 2004 Enterprise Database Systems Enterprise servers are powerful and available in many different configurations They also tend to be VERY expensive Pricing is usually based on users, or CPU’s

SLIDE 10IS 257 – Spring 2004 Pros and Cons of Database Options Enterprise databases –Can be very complex to set up and administer Oracle, for example recommends RAID-1 with 7x2 disk configuration as a bare minimum, more recommended –Expensive –Will scale to a very large number of users –Will scale to very large databases –Incorporate good transaction control and lock management –Native handling of Text search is poor, but most DBMS have add-on text search options –Support for applications software (ColdFusion, PHP, etc.)

SLIDE 11IS 257 – Spring 2004 Free Database Servers System is free, but there is also no help line. Include many of the features of Enterprise systems, but tend to be lighter weight Versions may vary in support for different systems Open Source -- So programmers can add features

SLIDE 12IS 257 – Spring 2004 Pros and Cons of Database Options Free databases –Can be complex to set up and administer –Inexpensive (FREE!) –usually will scale to a large number of users –Incorporate good transaction control and lock management –Native handling of Text search is poor –Support for applications software (ColdFusion, PHP, etc.)

SLIDE 13IS 257 – Spring 2004 Embedded Database Servers May require programming experience to install Tend to be fast and economical in space requirements

SLIDE 14IS 257 – Spring 2004 Pros and Cons of Database Options Embedded databases –Must be embedded in a program –Can be incorporated in a scripting language –inexpensive (for non-commercial application) –May not scale to a very large number of users (depends on how it is used) –Incorporate good transaction control and lock management –Text search support is minimal –May not support SQL

SLIDE 15IS 257 – Spring 2004 Database Security Different systems vary in security support: –Views or restricted subschemas –Authorization rules to identify users and the actions they can perform –User-defined procedures (and rule systems) to define additional constraints or limitations in using the database –Encryption to encode sensitive data –Authentication schemes to positively identify a person attempting to gain access to the database

SLIDE 16IS 257 – Spring 2004 Views A subset of the database presented to some set of users. –SQL: CREATE VIEW viewname AS SELECT field1, field2, field3,…, FROM table1, table2 WHERE ; –Note: “queries” in Access function as views.

SLIDE 17IS 257 – Spring 2004 Authorization Rules Most current DBMS permit the DBA to define “access permissions” on a table by table basis (at least) using the GRANT and REVOKE SQL commands. Some systems permit finer grained authorization (most use GRANT and REVOKE on variant views. Some desktop systems have poor authorization support.

SLIDE 18IS 257 – Spring 2004 Database Backup and Recovery Backup Journaling (audit trail) Checkpoint facility Recovery manager

SLIDE 19IS 257 – Spring 2004 Lecture Outline Review –Databases for Web Applications – Overview ColdFusion PHP and ASP DiveShop in ColdFusion

SLIDE 20IS 257 – Spring 2004

SLIDE 21IS 257 – Spring 2004 Web Application Server Software ColdFusion PHP ASP All of the are server-side scripting languages that embed code in HTML pages

SLIDE 22IS 257 – Spring 2004 ColdFusion Developing WWW sites typically involved a lot of programming to build dynamic sites –e.g. Pages generated as a result of catalog searches, etc. ColdFusion was designed to permit the construction of dynamic web sites with only minor extensions to HTML through a DBMS interface

SLIDE 23IS 257 – Spring 2004 ColdFusion Started as CGI –Drawback, as noted above, is that the entire system is run for each cgi invocation Split into cooperating components –NT service -- runs constantly –Server modules for 4 main Web Server API (glue that binds web server to ColdFusion service) {Apache, ISAPI, NSAPI, WSAPI} –Special CGI scripts for other servers

SLIDE 24IS 257 – Spring 2004 What ColdFusion is Good for Putting up databases onto the Web Handling dynamic databases (Frequent updates, etc) Making databases searchable and updateable by users.

SLIDE 25IS 257 – Spring 2004 Requirements Unix or NT systems Install as SuperUser Databases must be defined via “data source names (DSNs) by administrator

SLIDE 26IS 257 – Spring 2004 Requirements and Set Up Field names should be devoid of spaces. Use the underscore character, like new_items instead of "new items." Use key fields. Greatly reduces search time. Check permissions on the individual tables in your database and make sure that they have read-access for the username your Web server uses to log in. If your fields include large blocks of text, you'll want to include basic HTML coding within the text itself, including boldface, italics, and paragraph markers.

SLIDE 27IS 257 – Spring 2004 Templates Assume we have a database named contents_of_my_shopping_cart.mdb -- single table called contents... Create an HTML page (uses extension.cfm), before... SELECT * FROM contents ;

SLIDE 28IS 257 – Spring 2004 Templates cont. Contents of My Shopping Cart Contents of My Shopping Cart #Item# #Date_of_item# $#Price#

SLIDE 29IS 257 – Spring 2004 Templates cont. Contents of My Shopping Cart Bouncy Ball with Psychedelic Markings 12 December 1998 $0.25 Shiny Blue Widget 14 December 1998 $2.53 Large Orange Widget 14 December 1998 $3.75

SLIDE 30IS 257 – Spring 2004 CFIF and CFELSE Item: #Item#

SLIDE 31IS 257 – Spring 2004 More Templates INSERT INTO Employees(firstname, lastname, phoneext) VALUES(‘#firstname#’, ‘#lastname#’, ‘#phoneext#’) Employee Added Employee #firstname# #lastname# added.

SLIDE 32IS 257 – Spring 2004 CFML ColdFusion Markup Language Read data from and update data to databases and tables Create dynamic data-driven pages Perform conditional processing Populate forms with live data Process form submissions Generate and retrieve messages Perform HTTP and FTP function Perform credit card verification and authorization Read and write client-side cookies

SLIDE 33IS 257 – Spring 2004 PHP PHP is an Open Source Software project with many programmers working on the code. –Commonly paired with MySQL, another OSS project –Free –Both Windows and Unix support Estimated that more than 250,000 web sites use PHP as an Apache Module.

SLIDE 34IS 257 – Spring 2004 PHP Syntax Similar to ASP Includes most programming structures (Loops, functions, Arrays, etc.) Loads HTML form variables so that they are addressable by name <?php $myvar = “Hello World”; echo $myvar ; ?>

SLIDE 35IS 257 – Spring 2004 Combined with MySQL DBMS interface appears as a set of functions: <?php $db = mysql_connect(“localhost”, “root”); mysql_select_db(“mydb”,$db); $result = mysql_query(“SELECT * FROM employees”, $db); Printf(“First Name: %s \n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “first”); Printf(“Last Name: %s \n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “last”); ?>

SLIDE 36IS 257 – Spring 2004 ASP – Active Server Pages Another server-side scripting language From Microsoft using Visual Basic as the Language model (VBScript), though Javascript (actually MS Jscript) is also supported Works with Microsoft IIS and gives access to ODBC databases

SLIDE 37IS 257 – Spring 2004 ASP Syntax <% SQL="SELECT last, first FROM employees ORDER BY last" set conn = server.createobject("ADODB.Connection") conn.open “employee" set people=conn.execute(SQL) %> <% do while not people.eof set resultline=people(0) & “, “ & people(1) & “ ” Response.Write(resultline) people.movenext loop%>

SLIDE 38IS 257 – Spring 2004 Text Search Native text searching within databases is very poor. –Involves a full scan of the database to resolve “LIKE” queries. –Text fields are limited in size For example Oracle VARCHAR has a maximum of 4000 bytes LONG (BLOBS, etc) fields support larger data, but are not indexable and can’t be used in WHERE clauses. Some Databases offer Text retrieval add-ons –Oracle’s interMedia or ConText Text retrieval engines –Informix Text DataBlade –IBM DB2 Text Extender

SLIDE 39IS 257 – Spring 2004 Text Search Options

SLIDE 40IS 257 – Spring 2004 Features to look for Ranked and Boolean Search Proximity search Fielded searching Concept expansion Spider for Indexing Document types available –HTML, PDF, XML, MS-Office, Multimedia?

SLIDE 41IS 257 – Spring 2004 Other Options Have an external search engine crawl and present your site. –Inktomi provides portal sites for customers –Snap uses Inktomi to do the same sort of thing

SLIDE 42IS 257 – Spring 2004 Conclusions Database technology is a required component for large-scale dynamic Web sites, especially E-Commerce sites Web databases cover most of the needs of dynamic sites except for text search Many solutions and systems are available for web-enabled databases and search engines

SLIDE 43IS 257 – Spring 2004 ColdFusion Diveshop Examples from Fusion

SLIDE 44IS 257 – Spring 2004 Next Time More on SQL, including introduction to ORACLE –ORACLE Account information –ORACLE Documentation