Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Database Applications: Web-Enabled Databases and Search Engines: Cont. University of California, Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems SIMS 257: Database Management

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Today Databases for Web Applications – Continued

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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.

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Dynamic Web Applications 2 Server database CGI DBMS Web Server Internet Files Clients database

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Server Interfaces DatabaseWeb Server Web Application Server Adapted from John P Ashenfelter, Choosing a Database for Your Web Site 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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.)

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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.)

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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.)

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Embedded Database Servers May require programming experience to install Tend to be fast and economical in space requirements

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Web Application Server Software ColdFusion PHP ASP All of the are server-side scripting languages that embed code in HTML pages

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson What ColdFusion is Good for Putting up databases onto the Web Handling dynamic databases (Frequent updates, etc) Making databases searchable and updateable by users.

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Requirements Unix or NT systems Install as SuperUser Databases must be defined via “data source names (DSNs) by administrator

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Requirements and Set Up Field (attribute) 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.

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Templates 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Templates cont. Contents of My Shopping Cart Contents of My Shopping Cart #Item# #Date_of_item# $#Price#

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson CFIF and CFELSE Item: #Item#

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson More Templates INSERT INTO Employees(firstname, lastname, phoneext) VALUES(‘#firstname#’, ‘#lastname#’, ‘#phoneext#’) Employee Added Employee #firstname# #lastname# added.

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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.

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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 ; ?>

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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”); ?>

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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%>

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson Text Search Options

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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?

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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

Oct. 16, 2001Database Management -- R. Larson 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