web database design totally newbie

hi,

i am doing a software project in school regarding the design of a web based database that is accessible to local intranet. i am total newbie in this project. i have no experience of database at all.

the data to be retrieved comes from tabbed text files. is it possible to peform queries from these kind of files?

in terms of os, there are only two options available, linux or win 2k. what would be tradeoffs of the choice of os? which is better then?


as a total newbie, what would be the first step in learning how to build this database?

For most painless way to get started (though not recommended if you really want to understand what you are doing), create an Access database (it will import tab delimited files easily) and use ASP to get at and display the data. There are tons of examples out on the web that you can probably cut and paste and get running in no time. You won't be much smarter, but you can sure impress your friends.

If you want to actually understand what you are doing, it takes a great deal more time and effort. Real databases are often a bit tedious to set up and run and the way to interact with them depends on your choice of language and method of interface (i.e., Java vs C++, ODBC vs native libraries, etc.) Then, of course, you still haven't put up any web pages yet. That is another complex topic and could be done in Perl, scripts (VB, Java, etc), C/C++, PHP, etc., etc., etc.

You can even write simple retrieval and display web pages with the plain old tab delimited flat files, though if you want to write to them you have to deal with the (mostly nightmarish) problem of some how locking the file while you are making changes. There are libraries that will make flat files appear to be a relational database, but I stick with the real thing so can't offer any help with that at all.

This ain't something you can do in an hour if you want to understand what goes on under the hood.

for the OS, it really depends on which database and web page language you're going with.

windows: access or MS Sql Server, with asp pages
linux: MySQL, with php pages