Chapter 29. Configuring a Database Server
| IN THIS CHAPTER
Sooner or later, all large and popular websites are faced with the decision of whether to provide visitors with customized, dynamic content served from a database. For commercial sites, it's almost a requirement to supplement the static web content with a database back end, populated with customer profiles, product catalogs, user preferences, and all sorts of other information that allows the administrator to present a customized interface to the user. Even noncommercial sites can benefit from using databases, though. This chapter covers the fundamentals of database back-end usage as it applies to any site administrator, whether commercial or not. Using the freely available MySQL and PostgreSQL packages, you can develop a data store to attach to your web server. This chapter will teach you what you need to know in order to efficiently administer the server, to construct the database your website needs, to optimize its performance, and to protect its security. Databases aren't just for the Web, either. Long before the Web existed, databases were an integral part of commerce and engineering. But a database cannot be of any use without a good interface to the data inside it, and the Web is only the most recent such interface mechanism to achieve widespread use. Because databases can be used for a great many things other than providing dynamic web content, this chapter explains how you can use databases both in a general, standalone context and in the context of web connectivity. |
