By making the site database driven, I was able to incorporate
flexibility into the presentation as well as reduce the time needed to keep my
online resume up to date. Because of the relatively small number of tables, I
decided to use MS Access for my database. While SQL Server or Oracle would be
more suitable for an enterprise application, I felt that MS Access was the
appropriate choice to power my website.
The database is currently comprised of
twelve tables, although I plan to increase this number as I continue to expand
my site. I used MS Visio to create the schema diagram for my database. To see
the actual database schema for this website, please click the image on the
right.
The entire data access layer was
written using ADO.NET. The ADO.NET libraries are the collection of classes in
the .NET Framework which allow a .NET application to easily interface with its
database. By providing this layer of abstraction between the application and
the data, the database can be changed to another provider by simply changing
the ADO.NET classes which are involved.
For those queries which involved parent
and child tables such as for my work experience, I used the DataSet and
OleDbDataAdapter classes to retrieve the data. For those simple queries which
involved only a single table or perhaps an inner join of two or three tables, I
used the OleDbDataReader class.
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