Database driven site design

[lydia]

In response to Marc Davis <davis at revelation.unomaha.edu>,
Peter Schlumpf <schlumpf at nslsilus.org> writes:

> Databases can be VERY processor-intensive:  assembling pages on the fly
> everytime someone hits the page can be a drag on performance and really slow
> things down if you're not careful about design.
> Resources that are accessed frequently and don't really change a lot over time
> may be better left as static pages.  You may also want to consider the hybrid
> approach of pages automatically and periodically generated by a database but
> are stored and served up as static pages if performance becomes an issue.

We're using the MySQL/PHP combination at Harvard, but are generating static
production releases from the database to avoid this performance hit. For us,
revising the public site ~monthly is plenty of maintenance.   ;)

> Using the database-driven approach entirely for a web site strikes me as a
> strong violation of the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) and may be an
> unnecessary level of abstraction and complexity that you may later regret.

This may be true of many kinds of web sites, but the typical endeavor in which
many of us are engaged--providing access to dozens or even hundreds of
research-related resources for library users--strikes me as a perfect
application
for an underlying database. Our workflow has simplified drastically since we
finally made the jump from flatfile data storage to an underlying database.

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 Lydia Ievins, Systems Librarian        Office for Information Systems
 phone 617/495-3724; fax 617/495-0491   Harvard University Library
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