This white paper discusses the all-encompassing duties of
organisations that are charged with creating and maintaining
databases, especially for the Internet
The battle for database supremacy has long been based strictly
on performance. Who won the most recent benchmarking challenge? Who
can support the most users? While the performance battles continue
to rage on, the database vendor that ends up winning the war may
well be decided on a new battlefield - who can provide a complete
solution that addresses all of an organisation's database-centric
needs? In effect, who can provide the best full service
database?
Performance has always been, and will continue to be, one of the
most important criteria when evaluating database solutions. After
all, if a data store can't offer enough performance to support its
applications, then it just isn't a viable solution. A
top-performing database will also allow for maximum return on
investment by fully utilising both its available hardware and
software resources.In today's competitive landscape, organisations
charged with managing data and data access are experiencing
additional market pressures.The tremendous popularity of the
Internet has had data management teams scrambling for immediate and
long term strategic Internet solutions to satisfy the demands of
both end users and upper management. An increasingly sophisticated
end user population has resulted in greater demands for more timely
and more sophisticated access to data. Data management teams are
charged with satisfying these end users and providing improved
access to corporate data. The popularity of rapid application
development tools coupled with the above-mentioned sophisticated
user base has resulted in highly complex applications being built
faster than ever. The accelerated pace of application development
puts greater strains on current database management systems. Of
course, today's competitive environment has us all searching for
additional competitive advantages and cost savings. IT budgets are
being scrutinised more than ever, putting greater pressure on data
management teams to maximise the return on both hardware and
software investments. The most urgent market pressure facing such
teams is to provide both immediate and long term Internet
solutions. The Internet represents an entirely new vehicle of data
access, forcing data management teams to find, implement and
maintain solutions which exploit the many benefits this new
paradigm for data access represents. Initially, data management
teams must deliver access to corporate data via the Internet. The
benefits of data access via the Internet are clear - providing
business automation solutions to a new class of end users. With
database solutions hosted on the Internet, customers, prospects and
business partners can all have constant access to information
traditionally only available to those with direct connections to
the corporate network. While the benefits of data access via the
Internet are well documented, data management teams are faced with
the challenge of finding, implementing and maintaining enterprise
quality solutions that strike the appropriate balance between data
access via the Internet and maintained data integrity and
security.The majority of today's websites fall short of their
potential. Most are static publishing sites often containing little
more than marketing literature. They are impersonal, offering
limited end user interaction. Information delivered by these
websites must be stored and maintained directly in the web page,
quite often resulting in redundant, out-of-date information between
the database and the website. The architecture of these websites is
simple: the end user types in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) into
their web client (browser) and the browser connects to a web server
over the Internet via HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). The web
server receives the URL from the browser, retrieves the desired
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) page from the file system and
sends the requested page back to the browser. The end user can then
view the static HTML page from their browser.The desire is to
provide web pages that are dynamically generated from information
stored in a database. The end user can then retrieve information
via the Internet that is rich in content, completely up-to-date
with the data in the database and tailored to meet their specific
needs. This represents considerable challenges to data management
teams. The first challenge is to allow for the connectivity from
the Internet to the database while still maintaining data integrity
and security requirements. The second challenge is to actually
create and maintain this new vehicle of data access via the
Internet. At a minimum, data management teams will be charged with
creating and maintaining the portion of the corporate Internet that
dynamically accesses the database.With the introduction of the
Professional version of Sybase SQL Server for Windows NT, Sybase is
the first to offer a full service database for the Windows NT
platform. Sybase has successfully transformed the DBMS into a
content management system, offering a whole solution from Internet
access to website management to database design to query and
reporting tools.
Compiled from www.sybase.com