InfoTech News Letter 08.05.2005

Database Driven Websites

By: Nick Fasciano

InfoTech Solutions, LLC                                                   Phone Toll Free: 877.698.2051

What is a database driven website and why would anyone want one? Understanding that a website is a collection of one or more pages, lets start by discussing a page. In a hard copy book, a page is a piece of paper with words and maybe graphics on it. A good example for this discussion is the white pages business telephone book. You might ask, is the telephone book a database? Yes it is, it fits the general definition of database which is, "A collection of data arranged for ease and speed of search and retrieval. Also called data bank" The telephone book lists business name, address, telephone number and is arranged per the general definition of a database. The book is published yearly and guess what? The book is out of date long before it goes to the printer. New businesses are starting, existing businesses are closing, addresses are changing, the book is not accurate or complete. Forget the expense of publishing frequently enough to attempt accuracy and completeness, it is an impossible task. These pages are called "static" or unchanging pages.

Now lets look at the softcopy version of the book at http://www.whitepages.com/10001/business. This website has database driven pages. It still is not "up-to -the-minute" accurate but it's a whole lot better than the paper book.

So, a database driven website is one that collects, at least,  some of it's content from a connected database. Examples of database systems that can be connected to are Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and there are many others. The database is designed to contain information you want to display on your web pages. This collection of information from the database and insertion into the web page is accomplished with some programming running on the web server. Each time the dynamic web page is requested to be sent to a browser the server automatically builds the page and sends it to the browser as a standard web page. These pages are called "dynamic" or changing pages. The reason one would consider dynamic pages is if the page content changes frequently, such as inventory data, and accuracy and completeness is important to the site visitor. The frequently changing information on the web page can be managed by changing the information in the database manually through a simple administration interface or programmatically through integration into other business systems. Make a change and within seconds your web page has updated content. No need to download the page from the server, manually editing content and uploading the page to the server.

I have attempted to cover the basics in a way that lets you understand what database driven websites are and why you might want to consider one. During the requirements and specification phase of your website project you should decide if a database driven website is right for your business.