Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

Client/Server Architecture

At its simplest, the client/server architecture is about dividing up application processing into two or more logically distinct pieces. The database makes up half of the client/server architecture. The database is the “server”; any application that uses that data is a “client.” In many cases, the client and server reside on separate machines; in most cases, the client application is some sort of user-friendly interface to the database. Figure 8-2 provides a graphical representation of a simple client/server system.

Figure 8-2. The client/server architecture

You have probably seen this sort of architecture all over the Internet. The Web, for example, is a giant client/server application in which the web browser is the client and the web server is the server. In this scenario, the server is not a relational database server, but instead a specialized file server. The essential quality of a server is that it serves data in some format to a client.

Application logic

Because a client/server architecture specifically separates out components for UI and data processing, actual application processing is left up to the programmer to integrate. In other words, a client/server architecture does not provide an obvious place for a banking application to do interest calculations. Some client/server applications place this kind of processing in the database in the form of ...