Dynamic Servers And Web Pages in a Database
By Ken North
During a recent Dr. Dobb's Technetcast interview, Dale Dougherty described the traditional approach to automating and managing information. In one container, which we call a database, we put structured data such as rows and columns of numbers. In separate containers, we put multimedia, complex data, and documents such as HTML pages. The traditional method of organizing Web pages has been to store them as individual files managed by the operating system. In order to present a Web page that has database content, we go to the database container to extract information to integrate with HTML stored in the file-system container. This model requires a chain of software with links that can include a DBMS, middleware such as ODBC or JDBC drivers, and a Java servlet or an application built with CGI, Netscape Application Programming Interface (NSAPI), or Internet Server API (ISAPI). The picture changes when we use object-relational technology and universal database servers. The promise of object-relational technology is being able to store all content, including Web pages, in a single container known as a universal database. A universal database can store all types of content, including HTML documents, images, audio, video, and other rich data types. A server such as Informix Dynamic Server, Universal Data Option (DS/UD) can store the entire contents of a Web site.
DS/UD is Informix's extensible server for object-relational databases. DS/UD runs on Windows NT server and a variety of UNIX systems.
