Database management (RDBMS)

What have we done so far?

● Basic shell commands
● Running as root from a virtual box

● Opening and communicating with remote

computers using sockets

● What is the point of all this?

● We want to set up web services of our own

● We need to understand what the

communication protocols that underpin these

services can and cannot do
Architecture of a web service

Request
Client’s browser Server

Response

Query Pictures
Architecture of a web service

Server

Request
Client’s browser Data processor

Response

Data
LAMP stack
 Apache server running on Linux
● Listens for connections on ports you specify
– Where do we specify?
– In apache2.conf file
● Makes publicly viewable content you put in the
var/www/ folder of your Linux box
– Be sure permissions are set correctly (755/644)
● We’ve already seen how to set this up, even
inside a virtual container
 What’s the point of a database?
● Why can’t we just serve data from a csv file?
● Because then we’d have to load the whole file
into memory for every operation
– doesn’t scale well with data volume
● Relational database management systems
(RDBMS) are a popular variant
– Relational := related records
– Related via keys
 RDBMS = data modeling
● Learning to work with
RDBMS
– Connection etc. (5%)
– CRUD operations
(10% effort)
– Data modeling (85%
effort)
● What makes for an
effective data model?
 Data normalization
● How would you make queries on this
database?
 First normal form
● Every cell should have one value only
● Every record (row) should be unique
 Second normal form
● Primary key
– Must be unique and non-null
– Must auto-increment with records
– Cannot be changed
● Second normal form desiderata
– Be in 1st NF
– Single column primary key
Second normal form
Second normal form
 Third normal form
● Be in 2NF
● Remove transitive functional dependencies
● Transitive functional dependencies
Third normal form
 Database desiderata
● Databases must pass the ACID test
● Atomicity = in a transaction with two or more pieces
of information, either all are committed or none are
● Consistency = a transaction either creates a new
valid state, or changes nothing
● Isolation = an uncommitted transaction must stay in
isolation from other transactions
● Durability = committed data is saved by the system
so its available even in the event of a failure
 An employee management system
● An employee
● Belongs to one of several departments

● Has a certain salary

● Holds a certain title

● All of these things change over time

● How will you model this database?

Get the actual database from https://dev.mysql.com/doc/employee/en/

Data model
 Working with databases in mySQL
● Once you've downloaded the database, install it
to mysql
– Install mySQL if you don't have it on your machine
● Practice CRUD operations from the mysql shell
– CRUD = create, read, update, delete
– Basic syntax: [action] [target records] FROM
[table] .... [conditions/constraints];
 Practicing SQL
● Typical actions = select, update, delete, insert into
– e.g. select * from employees;
● Other actions = alter table, drop table, create
index, drop index
– e.g. alter table employees drop column last_name;
● Typical conditions = where, order by, group by
– e.g. delete from employees where emp_no = 342 ;
 Adding constraints during table
creation
CREATE TABLE Persons (
ID int NOT NULL,
LastName varchar(255) NOT NULL,
FirstName varchar(255),
Age int,
UNIQUE (ID)
);

Common constraints: not null, unique, primary key, foreign key, check, default,
index
 SQL with PHP
● A PHP script can be included anywhere within
an HTML document within the tags <?php ?>
● Have to use a .php extension for that file
● Syntax of PHP very much like C
● But it has a bunch of functions and (super)
global variables that simplify server-side
programming
● Most common server-side scripting language
Web form data entry with PHP
<form method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>">
Name: <input type="text" name="fname">
<input type="submit">
</form>
<?php
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
// collect value of input field
$name = $_REQUEST['fname'];
if (empty($name)) {
echo "Name is empty";
} else {
echo $name;
}
}
?>
 PHP+SQL
● Can use PHP to
– Connect to specific databases on your machine
<?php

$servername = "localhost";

$username = "username";

$password = "password";

$db = “emp_db”

// Create connection

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $db);

// Check connection

if ($conn->connect_error) {

die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);

echo "Connected successfully";

?>
 PHP+SQL
● Can use PHP to
– Execute SQL queries on the database tables

$sql = "SELECT id, firstname, lastname FROM employees";

$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
// output data of each row
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
echo "id: " . $row["id"]. " - Name: " . $row["firstname"]. " " .
$row["lastname"]. "<br>";
}
} else {
echo "0 results";
}
 Displaying results to the web
● PHP variables can be concatenated easily with
HTML strings to generate content dynamically

<?php
$txt1 = "SQL access ";
$txt2 = <data from SQL database>;

echo "<h2>" . $txt1 . "</h2>";

echo "Data from db" . $txt2 . "<br>";
?>
Architecture of a web service

Server

Request
Client’s browser Data processor

Response

PHP+
mySQL

Data
 In lab next week
● Learn how to connect to dbs on mysql shell and perform CRUD operations on
them
● Learn how to do the same thing using PHP
● I've posted a link to a nice tutorial for both on the website
● Build a web interface for the employees database such that
– I can query for employees by ID, by last name or by department
– I can identify which departments are the largest, by employee count
– I can display people within departments ordered by tenure with the company
– I can see the gender ratio of employees in any department
– I can see the gender pay ratio in any department
● Gender pay ratio = the ratio of female to male salary for the same job title
● Think about a different data set you could model for developing your own web
app for the coming week