W3C

WWW Access to Relational Databases

NOTE Note: Much of this information may be out of date. It has not been updated since 01 February 1995.

Many people have an application which needs a W3 server and is based in a relational database. This is a sign-up sheet, designed to put those interested in touch with each other.

You can look at the archive of www-rdb@info.cern.ch, a mailing list which was dedicated to discussions on this field.

Arthur Secret

Arthur did some work in this area while at CERN in 1992. See notes he wrote on leaving and pointers to sources .. This gateway allowed a user to enter an SQL expression as a search text to a W3 server. It formatted the results of the query and sent them back as plain text. This code contains all the include files and library references necessary to make any WWW-Oracle gateway (a large part of the job).

Michael Dobson

was doing some work on specific databases in the CMS collaboration. This is aimed at making a hypertext view of the DB around which the user navigates with no knowledge of SQL or of the fact that the DB exists at all. He builds on the work of A. Secret.

Many other people have expressed an interest. The writing of this summary was prompted by a request from:

Peter Joftis

	Peter Joftis  --  pmj@icpsr.umich.edu        +1 313 764-6554  Voice
	Director, Computer Support Group             +1 313 764-8041  FAX
	Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
	The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Drew Burton

Drew Burton , <drb@math.ams.org> at the American Mathematical Society writes, "At the Math Society we serve up information useful to mathematicians on an internet node named e-math. Right now we have a smattering of Gopher/WAIS and a bunch of in-house Ingres applications driven off a good-sized bibliographic database. If we can really do SQL queries off the back of a WWW client (even if it requires work on our part), we'd be very interested."

Decoux (INRA)

Decoux at INRA, Paris, <decoux@moulon.inra.fr> has taken Arthur Secret's work further. The URL now is of the form /oracle/db where db is the database name. The search term is the equivalent of the "where" clause in the SQL statement SELECT * FROM db WHERE clause.

See message ( french or english ) explaining what he has done. Now he's working on a Gateway WWW - Oraperl for Plexus 2.2 ( english or french )

See later message .

	Guy Decoux
 	INRA
 	Laboratoire de Genetique Vegetale
  	Tel :    (33 1) 69 41 97 37
 	Fax :    (33 1) 69 41 27 90
 	e-mail : decoux@moulon.inra.fr

Oracle

Culled from fome internal Oracle messages forwarded to me (timbl) in Jan 94, the names of some conacts within Oracle.
From: PYR2:dhaller@us.oracle.com
To: mturnill@uk.oracle.com 

Mike,

Do you have any additional information about Oracle links to the World Wide
WEB?

Thanks,

Dianne Haller
---------------------------
Received: 01-17-94 03:12                         Sent: 01-17-94 11:04 
From: pcole.UK
To: mkennedy.US dknight.US stonas.US bnewbold.US dhaller.US
Cc: ajeffrie.UK

[...]
I am not aware of any Oracle links to the WEB.

Two possible contacts for more information :

  Oracle's CERN Account Manager (Mike Turnill, email : mturnill@uk.oracle.com)
  knows about WWW ... perhaps he could be contacted for more info.

  Another interested party is John Danner, Project Leader for Oracle Book
  email : jdanner@us.oracle.com). I believe that he's been following WWW, WAIS,
  and Gopher for several months now.
[...]
Pete

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pete Cole                                Internet    : pcole@uk.oracle.com
Oracle Text Server Division              Oracle*Mail : pcole.uk
Oracle European Development Centre  
Guildford Road
Chertsey                                 Phone : +44 932 87 2020 extension 2172
England KT16 9RG                         Fax   : +44 932 87 3273
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Katherine A. Bouton

Drew Burton mentioned using WWW and Ingres. We are also trying to develop
such an application for use in managing oceanographic data,
 and I would be interested in finding out what others
are doing along these lines.

Thanks
Katherine A. Bouton (bouton@diu.cms.udel.edu)
Data Information Unit
College of Marine Studies
University of Delaware

Tim Fowlow

I am interested in talking with anyone who has written applications
that provide WWW access to a relational database.

We are about to embark on building a Project Oriented Information System
(POIS) that will provide WWW Access to an Ingres Relational database and any
project related files that a researcher might have.

The basic idea is to send queries to Ingres using Mosaic, then convert the
results to HTML (not just plain text) and use the results to access
additional information.

We would also like to be able to determine the suitability of Mosaic
for updating/adding/deleting information in the Ingres database.
In particular, we would like to know how Mosaic compares to a
product like windows 4GL in terms of how long it takes to build
the basic interface forms, etc.

Tim

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Fowlow (MDA R&D Computing Support) Canada Centre for Remote Sensing
Tel: (613) 947-1394                    588 Booth Street
Fax: (613) 947-1383                    Ottawa, ON., CANADA
e-mail: fowlow@ccrs.emr.ca             K1A 0Y7
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Statsinger

I am particularly interested in the Census
database because it uses InterBase, one of our
products.

Can you put me in touch with the persons who set this up?

Robert Statsinger <robert@interbase.borland.com>

Margaret Stoesser

I'd be very interested in a link to SYBASE.  Is there any
in progress?  There is already a Sybperl available.

Margaret

===========================================================================
|                                                                         |
|      Margaret Stoesser    *    SGI WorkStations                         |
|          (415)390-2427    *                                             |
|  stoesser@corp.sgi.com    * ...Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  |
|                                                                         |
===========================================================================

Ken Flagg

We are starting work on a generic database browser that will work with
the World Wide Web.  At this point we are looking at what has been
that we can build on.  We have a generic database browser that works
on a local database and are attempting to broaden it.

Ken Flagg
flagg@ise1.saic.com

Kevin Brady

we have
       a great interest in Remote Database Access. We are planning
       to interface Mosaic to ANY relational database using the
       RDA protocol (ISO 9579). We would like to talk to all interested
       parties to gain insight/knowlege of the problems and solutions.
       Please contact me at:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 _   ,                      __                     |      Kevin Brady
' ) /                      /  )             /      | Database Languages Group
 /-<   _ , __o  ____      /--<  __  __.  __/ __  , | Computer Systems Laboratory
/   ) </_\/ <__/ / <_    /___/_/ (_(_/|_(_/_/ (_/_ | National Institute of
                                               /   | Standards and Technology
                                              ,    | kevin@speckle.ncsl.nist.gov
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stan Letovsky

has developed Genera, a gateway from the World-Wide Web to Sybase databases.

Genera lets you provide Web access to the contents of Sybase databases without writing a line of code. Just describe how you want your data objects to appear using the easy-to-use Genera schema notation, and Genera will automatically extract objects from your database and format them into elegant HTML.

Genera supports URLs to database objects, as well as powerful query forms that provide the power of relational queries with the simplicity of fill-in-the-blanks: no SQL needed! Genera is also useful for providing full-text search of Sybase databases via Web/WAIS and Gopher/WAIS hookups.

Genera so far has been compiled only under UNIX SunOS 4.1.x on Sparcs; other platforms may require tweaking...


W3C
Tim BL
Webmaster