What is a web database?

A web database refers to a system used to store information which can be accessed through a website. For instance, a social network can have a web database that stores the details of its members, such as username, password etc. The most popular web database system is MySQL as integrates well with PHP —the most popular server side programming language.

A web database consists of one or more tables with data. Every table has various fields for storing different types of information. These tables can be linked together to manipulate the data in a useful or interesting way. A table often uses a unique primary key for each entry, which allows for clear data selection.

What are web databases used for?

A web database can serve various purposes. Every field in a table must have defined data. For instance, a web database can contain numbers, dates and strings. A good database design involves selecting the right data type for every field to limit memory consumption and enhance accessibility speed. Although this may not be so important for small databases, bigger ones that have multiple entries will find it useful.

Content management systems (CMS) usually use web databases for storing information, like posts, comments and usernames. By using a database, a website will be updated easily without having to edit the HTML codes for each individual web page. Apart from making the creation and update of a website more efficient, it enhances the accessibility of the process to people who are not well versed with the web programming languages.

A good example where web databases are used is an online forum. A database for an online forum consists of multiple tables, including a table for settings, users and posts. The relationship between the web database tables needs to be properly defined and set so that users and posts can be easily linked together.

The difference between dynamic and static web pages

A static site stores text in form of HTML and graphics. On the other hand, dynamic web pages are created through programming scripts or languages, which retrieve or store data in the web database. However, website owners don’t have to learn the programming languages. They can easily interact with the website through user-friendly CMS. CMS can be tailored according to your specific requirements. The content and look of static web pages rarely change. To make any change, you must either create the web page yourself or ask a web developer to do it on your behalf. But dynamic pages can change on their own whenever they are loaded.

There are more and more businesses these days opting for off the shelf software due to its lower cost and the fact that it is more readily available, but this has led to businesses having to train employees to work with their chosen software costing the company a lot of money that doesn’t particularly need to be spent. Most people think of custom software as expensive and not worth the hassle and cost, but with more and more people becoming competent programmers custom software is becoming easier to get hold of and cheaper to build.

There are many advantages to buying custom software. The first advantage is that it can be made a lot more easy to use and simple than off the shelf software and it can be tailored specifically to you, your employees, and your business. This means that you won’t have to spend a lot of time or money training somebody to use the software as it would be made specifically for them. The second advantage is that you won’t have any features that you don’t need, most non-custom made software will have a lot of features built in to them that aren’t necessary for its usage and will just complicate things and slow things down in the long run. Another huge advantage is that custom software can be made so it is easy to manage and build upon, a problem that a lot of off the shelf software has is that it is hard to manage and cannot be built upon or added to as you are not allowed to edit the code or tailor the program to you or your business in most cases, where-as custom made software will allow you to do this.

These are just a few of the many other benefits that buying your own custom built software can have, it is an extremely good option for any business regardless of size and in the long term will contribute greatly to the success and smooth running of the business. Although you must bare in mind whether or not it would be worth it based on what software there already is out there on the market and if their are any companies providing the software that you need.

The whole process of custom software development is classified into a number of steps, where a specific operation is performed in each of these steps. Each step plays an important role in the entire development process. The process is classified into 7 steps; planning, analysis, design, development and implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance. Here is the description of every step that may give you a better understanding of this process.

1. Planning

Planning is the first stage in the software development which involves planning the total project to estimate the possible benefits and drawbacks of the development project. It involves defining the product, developing the plan and managing the project plan throughout the process.

2. Analysis

The analysis phase aims at performing statistics and gathering requirements. The requirements are decided and gathered depending on the planning phase results. After the project requirements are gathered, they are made ready for use.

3. Design

The aim of the design phase is to come up with the architecture of the system. This is a very important stage in the process and acts as a benchmark stage as the errors made until this stage can be eliminated here. In most cases, a prototype of the whole software – which represents the final product as a model – is developed. This helps to detect and remove any technical and design flaws.

4. Development and Implementation

This is the most important stage in the whole process as the major part of the entire project is executed here. It involves designing the technical architecture and maintaining the database records and development process programs. One of the major activities is implementing the model into the final product.

5. Testing

This is the final stage of the software development process and it’s the stage where the product is fine-tuned before presenting it to the client. During this stage, the bugs and logical errors are removed. The test procedures and conditions, which are set in the analysis stage, are applied here. If the final output is equal to the expected output, then project has met its target and the software should be given to the user.

6 & 7. Deployment and Maintenance

The maintenance phase is a very important process as it can determine whether or not the final product is efficient. If there are few maintenance sessions, then the product was designed well. The maintenance team monitors any change in the organization and efficiency of the software. This phase also comes with an information desk, which helps to maintain a good relationship between the creator and the client.