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Web Databases
Part 1: Understanding the basics
6/22/98

by Edward Piou

In the beginning, there were static Web pages. Some were text-only, some had nice images, but each page generally stayed the same, changing neither content nor appearance in response to users' actions. It was new. It was good. It just wasn't great.

Then came the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). CGI programs allowed the display of dynamic pages -- pages with appearance and content that changed based on information that users input. The programs could do fancy things like send email messages or save information to a file on a server. CGIs were around near the Web's beginning, but it took some time for them to become common. Still, it was getting better.

And now there are databases. Databases have been around since before the Web was born, but they weren't used much on the Web in its early days. As more tools and scripting languages are being developed to help connect databases to web sites, things are becoming much more interesting.

Databases allow you to deal with large amounts of information efficiently and easily. They can do things that static pages can't (such as serving a different advertisement each time someone views a web page). And they simplify tasks that would be difficult with CGIs alone (such as searching for and displaying items in a large online catalog).

In this guide to web databases, I'll show you how a web-connected database can make managing large amounts of information easier, allowing you to improve on the services you provide. Later this summer in a followup article, I'll help you decide which database is best for you and what tools to use to connect it to your site.

But first, let's find out exactly what a database is.

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