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Final Exam Review Spring 2003: Database Ideas

Questions, answers, comments?

(Back to Sp2003 Final Exam Review)

1. SQL is Structured Query Language (pronounced "sequel"). It is a language for database creation and manipulation.
2. Databases are fast, they can be accessed from more than one place in more than one way, and they store relations between data. Because of this, you should use databases when handling large, complex manipulations, especially with tables. MySQL is an example database.
3. A site like cnn.com is run off a database. All the reporters write their stories and put them into the main database. From there, the stories are generated to the webpage.
4. news.google.com basically searches all the other news sites for stories and then puts them on one webpage. It looks for keywords and then importance on each website and lays the stories out accordingly.
Kelly Farrell
Good – #3 and #4 could be expanded a bit. What does it mean to generate stories to the webpage? What do keywords have to do with anything on news.google? Mark Guzdial

The keywords that news.google searches for are ones that appear in headlines on multiple news websites (matching keywords). It then takes these headlines and creates links to the other news sites using them.
Summer McWilliams
Think about the process – the headlines come first, then the keywords. News.google.com programmers don't decide what the important keywords are first. Instead, they get the headlines, then figure out what are the common words so that similar headlines are clumped. Mark Guzdial
CNN.com would use databases so that reporters don't have to be programmers also, they just fill in the database and it generates the webpage, that way they don't have to know HTML or they don't have to give their story to programmers for them to mess up the grammar or something.
Right, but then, how does the HTML get generated? If you go to http://www.cnn.com, you'll find an HTML page. How did that get there? Mark Guzdial

The HTML gets generated by the database. It is what actually RUNS the website, right? Kelly Farrell
The HTML is generated by some external program (maybe in Python), but pulling information from the database. Just like we did when we inserted a headline and story into our home page. Some databases may have programming languages so that you can do the HTML generation from there, too, but more typically, you'd use languages like Perl, PHP, JavaScript (on the server side), or even, PYTHON! Mark Guzdial

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