Sharing Data Across the Internet

In the early 1990s, before the World Wide Web, we used to share data using FTP. People would run FTP servers because they wanted to share data with others. You would ask the system administrator for an account and he would have to set one up for you. After a while system administrators got sick of creating accountsthey would simply set up one account with the username anonymous and leave the password blank (more commonly they would allow any passwordthe convention was that you used your email address as your password). The use of FTP to share text, data, images, and software proved to be phenomenally popular. Then hypertext was invented, and very soon the rest of the world found out about the Internet; and anonymous FTP sites became overwhelmed by cracked software and pornography, and system administrators gradually added more restrictions. Today most anonymous FTP sites are read-only. Those that allow anonymous uploads do so by maintaining a write-only queue that the administrators review before making uploads available for download.

12.1.1. Allowing Anonymous SQL Accounts

Today people can share data by running database servers. In most cases, you grant access to your database server to people you trust, typically people in the same organization, but that is not always the case. You decide what you are going to publish and how you are going to protect your web server, and you can do exactly the same with your database server.