Database Programming

Introduction

Databases offer a convenient and powerful way to organize, access and update data. Modern relational databases are very powerful and can do multitude of tasks with ease.

• Databases usually consist of TABLES and VIEWS. Tables can be thought of as records.
• A table has COLUMNS, representing the DATA FIELDS
• A table has one or more KEYS, and we may INDEX a table by one or more of its columns.

Accessing a database

SQL short for Structured Query Language offers a consistent way to access different features of databases. Database programming usually consists of providing an application specific interface to the database using SQL.

What you can do with SQL

• set-up (create tables, etc)
• QUERY (select information from tables or views)
• UPDATE (add rows to tables)

For more information on SQL and its usage, see SQL Tutorial

Typical Database Programming

Typically the programming involves doing the following things.

• Connect to the database
• Prepare a Statement
• Execute the Statemnt
• Parse the results to put in human-readable form
• Close the connection

In each step, error handling plays an important role. The examples in the Perl DBI Tutorial and Oracle 'Hello World' show this programming paradigm.

Technologies

Different database provide various ways to interact with it. Perl designers came up with a database independet interface called DBI (Database Interface) to interact with databases without the hassle of knowing how to do above things for each database. Similarly Sun developed JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) to access various databases transparently. ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) developed by Microsoft offers similar database independent interface at a lower level.

In this course we support the following methods to connect to the database

• Connect to database using Perl and DBI module
• Connect to database using Jsp(Java) and JDBC

Tutorials

We have tutorials for above technologies and also for Php etc...

• Tutorial for Perl DBI Programming
• Tutorial for Php Database Programming
• Tutorial for Java and JDBC

A Flat list of Tutorials is here.

Books

For beginners Learning Perl is a good start. Once you gain experience, you can try Programming Perl. For Perl DBI Programming, Programming Perl DBI is highly recommended. CGI Programming with Perl is a good book for learning CGI. Some reviews of the books can be found here.

For JDBC Programming, JDBC and JAVA is a good start.