Williamsport Web Developer Weblog

Today I learned how to change the design of a table in Access without opening the database file in Access and overwriting the file. This is necessary if you are using an Access database on a web site where a file overwrite could cause you to accidentally lose some recently entered data.

The syntax for the SQL statement to add columns to a table is:

ALTER TABLE tblName ADD COLUMN colName TEXT(255) NULL;

The trick is that you must use the NULL keyward to make the column nullable or the statement will fail.

Today I wrote a PHP script to return MySQL database records according to the search criteria entered into a web form. This is similar to my Active Server Pages scripts. I used my simple reading list database as an example. The database table only has three fields so it is easy to write programs that work with it. My web site visitors can now search my database for books I have read. The shockwave record browser forced you to scroll through the records one at a time.

I am currently studying for certification exam 70-305, “Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual Basic.NET and Visual Studio.NET”. I am reading the Exam Cram book written by Mike Gunderloy.

Today I managed to populate my Books table using a PHP script. The bulk inport for MySQL did not work so I had to write a little VBScript to generate the PHP code for multiple SQL, INSERT INTO statements. I generated 2000 lines of code to insert 2000 records which worked remarkable well. It did not time out on me as an ASP script populating a SQL Server database would have surely done.

I found that the Williamsport Sun-Gazette web site had been hacked this Sunday morning. According to their defaced home page, they were hacked by some Turkish muslims from North Cyprus. I have a screen shot of their defaced home page.

I don’t subscribe to the Sun Gazette anymore because I can get my news online and I consider that newspaper to be the bane of our community.

Sun Gazette

Today I installed the Oracle XE database and created a table, a database user, and an application. I imported data from a CSV file into my table. The Oracle XE administration interface is entirely browser based.

Oracle XE