Hi all,

Can you help me to make some things clear about databases?

I guess this forum's contens are stored in a database. Is it right to
say that this website is acting like the database's client application?

I want to make a database and want people to be able to access the
database contents via the Internet. Normally the web is used for this,
but I prefer not to use PHP or even http. My problem with the web is
that the user(/client) is stuck to a pre-made GUI (website layout). Is
there a way to deliver _only_ the database contents to client, so that
the client can decide about the way the data is viewed himself? A kind
of Database Transfer Protocol and a dedicated database client (software)?

So, just in case: I'm trying to discuss how to make data (from
databases) available over the internet.

My initional thread on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...abase_querying

Pieter Verberne

sure, use something like phpmyadmin and give permission to PUBLIC

two warnings:
1. your clients will have to be SQL experts in order to get the data out
2. your database will soon be blown away by miscreants

We have to have our fun somehow

Yes. Use stored procedures.

or if you are stuck in the web world use XML
offer a default stylesheet, but allow the user to define their own stylesheet

of course you could 'just' send the data as HTML, with suitable class identifiers and use CSS

Use the New Report Builder functionality from SQL2005 Reporting Services, That should do what you want
+
Contain safegurds like security (if needed), data abstraction, query timeouts etc.

OMG were all gonna be out of a Job - LOL

Reading your link it appears you just want to have database access to Wikipedia. It’s trivial to download the latest database dumps from Wikipedia and load them up on your PC or webserver (assuming you have MySQL). Most people use the standard web based GUI because it’s easy to find articles. I suggest you download the dump and try writing a few queries on the database first – you’ll soon go back to wanting to use the web based tool!

After that, if you still want to provide the world with SQL access, then put the dump on your web server and then build a simple screen to input SQL and run it – I’d imagine the code for this would be less than 20 lines (of PHP). Your problems will be :

• Nobody will use it! It’s just too difficult to get to the info.
• How would you teach users what tables and fields to use?
• The system will grind to a halt every time someone enters a long running query.

What advantages (if any) do you envisage for the end user? If you just want to see what entries a user has made (assuming these reports aren’t available through Wikipedia) then just supply a simple (web based) form that accesses your database and runs a SQL query that you’ve written and passes back links to the original Wikipedia articles. Saying all this I did put Wikipedia onto my little Nokia N800 and it works great.

nice to know this, also how to use it on apache

It's not easy to be done. If you don't want a web site application in PHP or ASP.NET or similar, then you have to create the database placed on the web site for the beginning. Then, if you want clients to view its content and let them search data by their own, you have to deliver an application that gets connected to the corresponding web site and search the database by certain parameters. You can go to our site http://vl.milicev.users.sbb.rs and download the free demo named YPS Sombrero. It is used for local computer searching, but there is a solution for web site database searching as well.

I believe that the user's browser would technically be considered the client application.

And if you want a Web database, TYPICALLY what would happen is that a database such as Access (basically just consisting of tables) would be put on the Web.

Then "dynamic" Web pages such as ASP or PHP pages would be created acting like the old desktop database's queries, forms, and reports to access the database - all hosted on a Web Server.

And a nice thing about all this is that if you need to make a change to the data or the application it can all be done on the server as opposed to going around making sure that all the users have the latest version of your software on their PC's...

FileMaker Server has had a feature to put a database up on a website quite quickly. It may do exactly what you want, and the marketing blurb says that it will put out PHP, so anyone who knew a little PHP could customize it.

There's a link to the free trial on that page. The server edition is pretty expensive; FileMakerPro may do the same for less $$.