Exercise 5: Database case study

Do EITHER Case A or Case B as your database case study for this exercise.




On your own machine, setup and test either database system and report your findings.

Case A: Microsoft SQL server

The relational DBMS uses Structured Query Language (SQL) as a standard. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has support for .NET Framework, so that stored procedures can used be in any of the .NET languages. Microsoft Dreamspark at dreamspark.com is an interesting site for the student/developer using Microsoft products.



1. Investigate the. SQL Server 2008 architecture available from the Dreamspark website.



2. Test out the SQL Server Express as a lightweight application development tool. SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and report your findings.

Case B: PHP and MySQL

Since over three million PHP/MySQL open-source relational model and web-based database systems are over the Internet, let us taker a closer look at this popular system - as we can learn how many of the other systems operate, in similar ways.



As a GUI admin tool the phpMyAdmin tool is still widely used to setup and maintain a MySQL database and is available from phpmyadmin.net The most frequently used operations include creating and editing tables, fields, relations, indexes, users, permissions and deletions, as well as executing any SQL statement. Other MySQL GUI tools are found for Windows, MacOS and Linux users at dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html



PHP is at http://php.net/ . The PHP engine works well with the Apache Web server

- and a MySQL server is also needed. PHP files end in .php; this triggers the web server to pass the file to the PHP program for parsing and execution. The PHP code is placed within an XML (or HTML) compliant tag and a semi-colon is used to end PHP instructions.



Reference:


Charles Sturt University ITC 594 E-system infrastructure development student study guide