IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 1

Database Applications andIntroduction to ColdFusion

and PHPUniversity of California, Berkeley

School of Information Management and Systems

SIMS 257: Database Management

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 2

Lecture Outline

• Review– Databases for Web Applications – Overview

• ColdFusion

• PHP and ASP

• DiveShop in ColdFusion

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 3

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.

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 4

Dynamic Web Applications 2

Server

database

CGI

DBMS

Web Server

Internet

Files

Clients

database

database

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 5

Server Interfaces

Adapted from John P Ashenfelter, Choosing a Database for Your Web Site

DatabaseWeb Server

Web ApplicationServer

Web DBApp

HTML

JavaScript

DHTML

CGI

Web Server API’s

ColdFusion PhP Perl

Java ASP

SQL

ODBCNative DBinterfaces JDBC

Native DB

Interfaces

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 6

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 7

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

System (producer)Platform SQL ODBC Scaling PriceAccess (Microsoft) Windows Yes Yes SQL Server ~$200FoxPro (Microsoft) Windows, Mac Yes Yes SQL Server ~$200FileMaker (FileMaker) Windows, Mac No No FileMaker Server ~$200Excel (Microsoft) Windows, Mac No Yes Convert to Access~$200

Files (owner) Windows, Mac No No Import into DB ?

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 8

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.)

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 9

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

System Platform SQL ODBC JDBC Web?SQL-Server (Microsoft) WIndowsNT -2000 Yes Yes ? Yes (IIS)Oracle Internet Platform Unix, Linux, NT Yes Yes Yes Yes

Informix Internet Foundation.2000 Unix, Linux, NT Yes Yes Yes YesSybase Adaptive Server Unix, Linux, NT Yes Yes Yes YesDB2 (IBM) IBM,Unix, Linux, NT Yes Yes Yes Yes?

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 10

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.)

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 11

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

System Platform SQL ODBC JDBC Web?mSQL Unix, Linux Yes Yes No(?) No?MySQL Unix, Linux, NT Yes Yes No(?) No?PostgreSQL Unix, Linux, NT Yes Yes Yes No?

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 12

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.)

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 13

Embedded Database Servers

• May require programming experience to install

• Tend to be fast and economical in space requirements

System Platform SQL ODBC JDBC Web?Sleepycat DB Unix, Linux, Win No No Java API No?Solid Unix, Linux, Win Yes Yes Yes Yes

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 14

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 15

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 16

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 <where clause>;

– Note: “queries” in Access function as views.

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 17

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.

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 18

Database Backup and Recovery

• Backup

• Journaling (audit trail)

• Checkpoint facility

• Recovery manager

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 19

Lecture Outline

• Review– Databases for Web Applications – Overview

• ColdFusion

• PHP and ASP

• DiveShop in ColdFusion

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 20

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 21

Web Application Server Software

• ColdFusion

• PHP

• ASP

• All of the are server-side scripting languages that embed code in HTML pages

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 22

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 23

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 24

What ColdFusion is Good for

• Putting up databases onto the Web

• Handling dynamic databases (Frequent updates, etc)

• Making databases searchable and updateable by users.

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 25

Requirements

• Unix or NT systems

• Install as SuperUser

• Databases must be defined via “data source names (DSNs) by administrator

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 26

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.

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 27

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 <HEAD>...

• <CFQUERY NAME= ”cart" DATASOURCE=“contents_of_my_shopping_cart"> SELECT * FROM contents ; </CFQUERY>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 28

Templates cont.

• <HEAD>• <TITLE>Contents of My Shopping Cart</TITLE>• </HEAD>• <BODY>• <H1>Contents of My Shopping Cart</H1>• <CFOUTPUT QUERY= ”cart">• <B>#Item#</B> <BR>• #Date_of_item# <BR>• $#Price# <P>• </CFOUTPUT>• </BODY>• </HTML>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 29

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 30

CFIF and CFELSE

<CFOUTPUT QUERY= ”cart"> Item: #Item# <BR><CFIF #Picture# EQ""> <IMG SRC=“generic_picture.jpg"> <BR><CFELSE> <IMG SRC="#Picture#"> <BR></CFIF></CFOUTPUT>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 31

More Templates

<CFQUERY DATASOURCE = “AZ2”>INSERT INTO Employees(firstname, lastname,phoneext) VALUES(‘#firstname#’, ‘#lastname#’,‘#phoneext#’) </CFQUERY><HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Employee Added</TITLE><BODY><H1>Employee Added</H1><CFOUTPUT>Employee <B>#firstname# #lastname#</B> added.</CFOUTPUT></BODY></HTML>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 32

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 email messages• Perform HTTP and FTP function• Perform credit card verification and authorization• Read and write client-side cookies

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 33

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.

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 34

PHP Syntax

• Similar to ASP

• Includes most programming structures (Loops, functions, Arrays, etc.)

• Loads HTML form variables so that they are addressable by name

<HTML><BODY>

<?php

$myvar = “Hello World”;

echo $myvar ;

?>

</BODY></HTML>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 35

Combined with MySQL

• DBMS interface appears as a set of functions:

<HTML><BODY><?php$db = mysql_connect(“localhost”, “root”);mysql_select_db(“mydb”,$db);$result = mysql_query(“SELECT * FROM employees”, $db);Printf(“First Name: %s <br>\n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “first”);Printf(“Last Name: %s <br>\n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “last”);?></BODY></HTML>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 36

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 37

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) & “<BR>” Response.Write(resultline) people.movenextloop%><% people.close %>

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 38

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 39

Text Search Options

Search Engines Manufacturer Price PlatformAltavista Search Intranet Altavista $16,000 Unix, NTCheshire II, Cha-Cha UC Berkeley Free or ? UnixDig Open Source Free Unix Fulcrum Knowledge Net Fulcrum $5,000 Unix, NTIndex Server (MS) Microsoft Free NTInfoMagnet CompassWare $5000+100 NTNetscape Compass Netscape $1,295 Unix, NTPLWeb Turbo Personal Library Softw. $7-10000 Unix, NTRetrievalWare Excalibur $12,500 Unix, NTVerity Information Server Verity $5,000 Unix, NTUltraseek server Infoseek $1,000 SolarisWebinator Thunderstone Free or $700 Unix, NTWebGlimpse Univ of Tucson Free or $200 Unix, NT

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 40

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?

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 41

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 42

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

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 43

ColdFusion Diveshop

• Examples from Fusion

IS 257 – Spring 2004 2004.03.02- SLIDE 44

Next Time

• More on SQL, including introduction to ORACLE– ORACLE Account information– ORACLE Documentation