Databases are not very glamourous. They are the domain of techno geeks and nerds who spend more time writing queries and testing them than doing anything else. I like them!

In it’s raw form, a database is just a collection of tables, almost like a spreadsheet really, but for a database to be really useful there needs to be a relationship between these tables. All elmnet customers who have a content management system have a relational database in the background running the show. In brief, whenever they update their content they are in effect updating a database, and the changes that they make are instantly reflected in their website.

A database table may contain fields such as ‘title’, ‘section’, ‘content’ and ‘date’. These fields may contain entries such as ‘Welcome to my site’, ’1′, ‘My site content goes in here’ and ’29th July 2009′. The clever bit is that the entry under ‘section’ relates to another table in the database, so although the value of ’1′ means very little by itself, when the database looks into the table called ‘sections’ and finds that the section with the ID number of ’1′ is called ‘About Me’ it all starts to come together. And because this section is referenced by a number we can change the name of the section if we like. We could rename it to ‘Who We Are’ for example, but as it still has the ID number of ’1′ the database integrity remains intact.

The purpose of this post though is to consider the more traditional database, and it’s potential to be held online rather than in a database application such as Microsoft Access. We’ve recently converted an MS Access database with over 18,500 entries into an online version for a customer of ours. The database contains information on previous and current visitors to events, and all the things that could be carried out in Access such as searches, filtering, exporting, updating, inserting and deleting can all be actioned using the online version. It’s been converted from an .mdb file to a mySQL database and it’s all queried using a custom coded, very user friendly web based management system, rather than the far more complex MS Access procedures.

Any set of results can be exported in a format that Word can use for mailing list labels, and as the system is stored online and backed up automatically it’s safer. There is also no problem with multiple users accessing the system at once from any location in the world, and it’s easily extendible – an email marketing system has been added on which talks directly to the email address field of the table that contains the customers personal details. It’s all password protected, and all access is logged.

So, when you think of the internet it’s worth remembering that it’s basically one big network used for sharing information. It doesn’t have to be a trendy website, it can be a complex database application made very simple.

It can streamline your operation and present you with information in a far more effective manner than you may have thought.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Internet, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.