Hello WebProNews Readers,

James Pendleton's article is different from others that we have published in that it touches on databases. This article introduces you to some of the concepts of databases and how you may use them in your marketing efforts.

I hope that you enjoy this issue.

Pete

The search engine databases play a significant part of the structure of the search engine's ability to provide data, also enabling sites to gain visibility on the WWW. Without these huge databases, there would not be any search engines!

I would think it would be an aid to understand the basic structure of these databases, where they are and who controls them. Are they actually part of the search engine or accessed from an outside source? What function do they serve with the interaction of inquiries of all types from the Internet surfer?

A database is simply a collection of bits and pieces of information. It holds all this information or data in some form of storage system.

Let's use our imagination for an analogy for a database.

It's a beautiful spring day. The sun is shining and the sky is as blue as you have ever seen it. As you lean back in your most comfortable chair on your back porch admiring your finely manicured lawn, you look over to your bird feeder and notice it is empty. It is decorated in nice colors, shaped like an oblong bottle made of plastic with plenty of access holes for the birds to partake of their needed feed.

You gather it off the hook and take it inside. Consider this. The empty feeder is the physical container -- the database repository. You reach for your bag of feed that is the birds' favorite and fill it up to the brim. The many pieces of feed flow in and fill the feeder. Those hundreds of thousands of bits of feed are the bits and pieces of data!

Satisfied with the level of feed in your container, you proceed outdoors and place it back on the hook. Go back to your porch and pull up your chair to enjoy watching the birds discover that the bird feeder is full of feed again. They are busily flying around the container. Birds of all kinds access each hole in the feeder to obtain a bit of feed.

This is what we as humans do when we interact with a database. The physical database container is most likely made up of very large hard drives or maybe huge tape systems that contain huge amounts of data on reels of tape that hold very large amounts of data. The software that is on the system makes decisions on what data to return when there is a request made to it. This is done from the query that is made to it. The query is called a query string. The software makes decisions in the form of the questions asked.

There are important guidelines involved in the question or query string asked of the software that returns the answer from the database. Without asking the question in the proper manner, the software will answer the question the best it can from the query and return its best guess for the answer. That is what makes using search engines so difficult because you often get back not quite what you were looking for on the first few tries.

First a bit about the physical database itself.

When defining the makeup of the physical manner of storage there is one term you need to know. It is RAID. No, not the bug spray but a very large storage system. Its size is on the order of hundreds of gigabytes and up! The large drives of desktop computers won't come close to holding that amount of data.

A RAID is Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers.

There are a number of different RAID levels. The three most common are 0, 3, and 5:

Level 0:
Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance.

Level 1:
Provides disk mirroring.

Level 3:
Same as Level 0, but also reserves one dedicated disk for error correction data. It provides good performance and some level of fault tolerance.

Level 5:
Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance.

Simply put, the RAID is a collection of very large hard drives. Probably SCSI with very fast bus speeds for high access speed and quick response. There are a lot more technical details about RAIDs and their functions, but they are too numerous to mention here.

So now that we know some basic information about how all those terabytes of data are stored. The next step is how do we access the data and get the information from it we are looking for?

If you were to ask this question to the gurus out there, the first thing they would probably say is MySQL.

MySQL is the query language of choice for most of the databases being used on the Internet. The topic of this database query language is quite complicated. MySQL is a very good web site for those of us who don't want all the technical jargon. The rest of the site is very informative and does have details about the language for those of you who want the gory details.

Ever tried to find something with a search engine and not get the results you want? If you answer no to this question, then you are a good searcher. For the rest of us it can be quite difficult to get the results we are looking for with one query.

First when you are looking at that search box do not type anything in it. First think of relevant terms that are associated with or related to the topic your are looking for. Write those terms down on a scratch piece of paper. Then write down some related subtopics of your terms. By doing this you are actually building a small set of query strings for the search engine to work on. It will return better results with these relevant terms. By using these instead of the actual topic you are searching for. In other words a narrow search with more specific topics and subtopics. Using the actual main topic will return a very broad result which will not have the specific item you are looking for. Using + signs the word and enhance the query string you use. In doing research for this article I used a very effective query in the Yahoo search engine and came up with some very good web sites for further reading, that will give you a lot more information on effective searching. They will open in a new window for ease in navigation.

James Pendleton is a motivated webmasterinterested in helping others learn and understand the realities of Marketing on the Internet. www.jgp-distribution.com

We at the Editorial Team would like to thank all our readers for reading WebProNews. We hope you find this information useful.

Peter Thiruselvam
Editor

The WebProNews Team