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Date:      Wed, 23 Jul 1997 23:45:17 +0200
From:      Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Database
Message-ID:  <19970723234517.04842@grendel.IAEhv.nl>
In-Reply-To: <199707230112.SAA17951@netroplex.com>; from Rod Ebrahimi on Tue, Jul 22, 1997 at 06:10:53PM -0700
References:  <199707230112.SAA17951@netroplex.com>

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Rod Ebrahimi shared with us:
> 	While on the subject of NT and FreeBSD, I wanted to address another issue.
> For management and ease we are looking into developing a database system
> that will be web based (privately) and enable employees to
> add/delete/modify users from the comfort of there own browser, which also
> in turn placed them on the billing list and sent invoices and/or charged
> Credit Cards on the fly. I would appreciate any information on this
> matter... Are there any well known Database designers that I should look
> for?

At work, we've been implementing web-based databases both on Unix's
and NT. For Unix, we have out own application that roughly does
the same thing as w3msql (a frontend for mSQL), but has some nice
extra features like sub-sub-sub-...-queries, if-then-else statements
and calling other applications.

For NT, we used Internet Database Connectivity, which is a part of
Internet Information Server, and thus, it's for free. You can
connect it to any database that speaks ODBC. It's very simple to
use, be it with some limitations. Conditional code is very limited
and due to the solution with two files, an .idc file and a .htx
file (which does have it's avantages), I haven't figured out yet
whether sub-queries (using the result of one query in the next)
are possible.

There's also dbWeb from Microsoft, but that's something like
FrontPage and I advise against it. I don't think it's reliable,
and apart from that, it's too limited.

Anyway, IDC is about your browser talking to a database, so your
invoices should be run from the database application. But we're
implementing a very big site with IIS, IDC and MS-SQL at the moment.
With some thinking, most of your problems can be solved with it.
We use CGI-programs for the rest, which work exactly the same way
as with Unix (to build platform-indepent code, you just need an
'#ifdef' around some '#include's).

Our own Unix program (which we will port to NT, of course) will
develop into something far more sophisticated, though.

- Peter



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