Since time immemorial, filing cabinets, files and folders were used as the de facto organisational meter of an organisation, or metaphors of these data storage articles thereof. Even now, computers have “files” and “folders” that store and organise data respectively. With the onset of computers and ubiquitous nature of these popular devices, the concept of a database was evolved and furthered from the ordinary and mundane nature of the real world examples. Computers meant fast data readability and recoverability – two very important things that are better when they are faster.
Faster, and better methods of data accumulation, organisation and presentment were developed before the boom of the World Wide Web. With the presence of the internet and its interconnectedness ever increasing, web databases were experimented with and developed into the mammoth libraries and storehouses of data that they are now. Web databases are the most efficient and powerful databases in the world of today, and many different online services we know of and use daily would be impossible without the organisation, indexing, quick searching and better readability offered by all these web databases. Amazon, Google, eBay, Craigslist and even Facebook use web databases for caching, recalling and storing messages, lists and tables.
Web databases proliferate by using the basic paradigms of offline database languages such as Microsoft’s Access, FOX pro and others. These programs worked on a set of keys such as “Name”, “Phone number”, “Address”, “Email” etc. and a data stored in many locations under this template of keys. The keys are constantly updated in a main program which arranges them alphabetically or weight wise (weight meaning the amount of data contained in a specific key) or any other way the user might want, and when needed, a search form can be programmed to search for a specific key data that is searched effectively because of the easy organisation.
Some of the most used online database programs are:-
- MySQL: An open source alternative to the classic Structured Query Language system that appends to many data sources including API’s and both a command line and a Graphical user interface.
- Oracle: Oracle corporation’s relational database management system (RDBMS) is widely used in many systems, and webpages because of its high market penetration and general ease of use.
- Perl DBI: An extensible interface of Perl, this Database Interface is an open source CPAN alternative to the other proliferating database languages.
