Beginning ASP.NET 4: in C# and VB

Chapter 12. Introducing Databases

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• What a database is and which databases are typically used with ASP.NET pages

• What SQL is, how it looks, and how you use it to manipulate data

• What database relationships are and why they are important

• Which tools you have available in VWD to manage objects (such as tables) and how to use them

Being able to use a database in your ASP.NET 4 web sites is just as critical as understanding HTML and CSS: it's almost impossible to build a modern, full-featured web site without it. Databases are useful because they enable you to store and retrieve data in a structured way. The biggest benefit of databases is that they can be accessed at runtime, which means you are no longer limited to just the relatively static files you create at design time in Visual Web Developer. You can use a database to store reviews, musical genres, pictures, information about users (usernames, e-mail addresses, passwords, and so on), log information about who reads your reviews, news articles, and much more, and then access that data from your ASPX pages.

This gives you great flexibility in the data you present, and the way you present it, enabling you to create highly dynamic web sites that can adapt to your visitors' preferences, to the content your site has to offer, or even to the roles or access rights that your users have.

To successfully work with a database in an ASPX page, this chapter teaches you how to access databases using a query language ...