Lesson 5. Retrieve Database Information

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Databases can hold important information used on your Web site, such as a product catalog, news headlines, or event or client information. Using the information that is stored in a database is essential to keeping the content on your site fresh. And it's important to be able to retrieve that information quickly and easily. ColdFusion offers powerful tools that make the tasks of retrieving and outputting information from a database simple and easy.

In this lesson, you'll work with a Microsoft Access database (although ColdFusion works equally well with enterprise-level products such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases). This database will contain fictional products for sale at thewirelessagent.com . You are going to use ColdFusion to retrieve and display the products from the database.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn what databases are and some common uses for them

• Create a ColdFusion data source

• Use SQL to return information from a database

• Output information returned from a database

• Cache a query

• Construct a dynamic query

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete.

LESSON FILES

Starting Files:

Lesson5\Start\products.mdb

Lesson5\Start\firstquery.cfm

Lesson5\Start\dynamic1.cfm

Lesson5\Start\dynamic2.cfm

Completed Files:

Lesson5\Complete\firstquery.cfm

Lesson5\Complete\dynamic1.cfm

Lesson5\Complete\dynamic2.cfm

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