Accessing Relational Databases from the World Wide Web

Abstract

With the growing popularity of the internet and the World Wide Web (Web), there is a fast growing demand for access to database management systems (DBMS) from the Web. We describe here techniques that we invented to bridge the gap between HTML, the standard markup language of the Web, and SQL, the standard query language used to access relational DBMS. We propose a flexible general purpose variable substitution mechanism that provides cross-language variable substitution between HTML input and SQL query strings as well as between SQL result rows and HTML output thus enabling the application developer to use the full capabilities of HTML for creation of query forms and reports, and SQL for queries and updates. The cross-language variable substitution mechanism has been used in the design and implementation of a system called DB2 WWW Connection that enables quick and easy construction of applications that access relational DBMS data from the Web. An end user of these DB2 WWW applications sees only the forms for his or her requests and resulting reports. A user fills out the forms, points and clicks to navigate the forms and to access the database as determined by the application.