Re: Database Licensing for Public Web Access

Hi there,

> I'd be interested in any comments anyone has regarding
> database licensing as it relates to the Web and a
> Public Internet Site.  
[...]
> I'm looking for some constructive debate on this topic to
> help the database vendors evaluate the issue because I'm
> in the business of helping organizations build "interactive
> database websites" and the database licensing issue (especailly
> the high initial cost) is keeping many organizations from
> jumping into the game.  

This is a re-announcement, maybe a bit off-topic:         
I had the problem of several institutions coming to me while working
at the university computing center dropping a disk an say: "Well, here
is our [windows, dos, mac, ...] DB for [your favorite field], can't you
publish that on the web ? Ah, by the way: At no cost !"

I developed a Perl script, which renders the DB to a tree of static HTML
pages once . The structure of the tree is based on the content of selected 
fields.
The only things I have to know about the raw database is:
1) How are tuples seperated (e.g. a null-byte)
2) How are fields seperated (maybe CR/LF)
3) The physical order of fields within a tupel
This may be approached by a very small script dumping the DB to a known
format. In one case I used the printer-dump-to-file as input :-)
The HTML can be varied using several templates spiced with user defined
macros.
After building the trees, I use WAIS to reindex the output. Markup to
support this step is generated by the script.

This surely is not the solution for big, constantly changing databases, but
I guess there are problems (like mine ;-) where this approach will be 
sufficient. Of course, each time you modify the DB, you will have to update
the whole tree. With my problem this has to be done only 2-3 times a 
year.
With the static aproach there will be two ways to retrive information:
By WAIS-query or by navigation. Probably a (say) mSQL drived solution
would be not that easy to set up to allow 'navigating by clicking'.
Please tell me, if I am wrong !
The software is free under terms of the GNU public license.
See http://www.scn.de/~inim/wwwcreat/  (2 MBit line)
or http://www.tu-clausthal.de/~inim/wwwcreat/  (128 KBit line)

Virtually yours,
Ingo
-- 
Campus:  Ingo.Macherius@tu-clausthal.de      http://www.tu-clausthal.de/~inim
Siemens: Ingo.Macherius@mwe.hvr.scn.de       http://www.scn.de/~inim
 information != knowledge != wisdom != truth != beauty != music == best (FZ)

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 1996 06:48:18 UTC