Introduction

1. Introduction
2. Database Concepts
3. Plan Your Database
4. Relations Between Tables
5. Normalization
6. Best Practices in Database Design
7. Database Naming Convention
8. Databases By Example
9. Useful Resources

Why Use Databases?

Classic HTML-based websites can become a headache as they grow in complexity. Changing hundreds of pages in a multi-lingual company presentation site can really deter site keepers from frequent content updates. As a result, the site eventually dies out by becoming obsolete. Dynamic websites come with a different approach to web development:content and presentation are separated. Content is organized and stored in a database, a repository that is afterwards accessed in order to either extract the relevant information where needed or to add new information.

In this article:

• I will showcase some of the advantages of going dynamic.
• I will explain the main concepts related to using and designing databases.
• I will guide you through designing your databases.
• I will suggest some best practices in database naming.

What is a database?

A database usually refers to data organized and stored on a computer that can be searched and retrieved by a computer program. As Ben Forta put it in one of his excellent articles, a database is a "structured collection of similar data". Basically, any entity in your application can be modeled as a database table, and any similar information can be stored as separate records in such tables. Imagine an online product catalog. Products are grouped by categories. Each product has a manufacturer. Since products are similar, they can be all stored in the same table. The same goes for categories and for manufactures.

What is a dynamic site?

Dynamic has nothing to do with animation or real-time applications. Dynamic simply means using a database. Unlike static websites, dynamic ones change automatically when a piece of data is added, updated or removed from the database. Reusing and syndicating content to other sites can also become a lot easier, since everything is stored in a central repository.

Every dynamic website is driven by a database, which defines the structure and organization of the data you will be manipulating. The database stores all site information which can be retrieved by the application server via a query. The relevant information is then returned as a recordset, which represents the query results.