So, first week of Uni over and as such, first week of my project over. It has been a fairly successful week in some ways, although mildly frustrating in others.

On Monday morning (AKA, first day back) I went and spoke to Brian Spencer to make my pitch to him. He was fairly impressed and most importantly, interested in my idea. He has said he will take it on and I just need to send him a project summary and he will confirm. I have written most of the summary now, just playing with some of the details.

So, I would like to try and explain what my project actually is so that later comments should mean more to people.

CMS’s (Content Management Systems) are some form of web based application which allows pages to be generated from database content. So normally you see something like index.php?id=42 in a URL. This means the variable “42″ is being passed into the script. Some checks are performed on it to make sure it is a valid number etc and then it collects the content (title, page details, place in the menu etc) from the database, and using that constructs the page using some form of template and gives it back to you.

So this means the page you are viewing doesn’t actually exist as a file, but it is generated from database content. The real beauty of this system is that means you can write an admin interface which can edit this content in the database and as such, non technical people can update pages.

This is all very well and normally such a system does all the logic (so, checking if the ID is a number, not text, dealing with errors like that ID that was requested not being in the database). This means you have a database that is just used for storing data and an application in something like C# or PHP that does all the “thought”.

Now modern database systems have basically become programming languages in their own right. They have a log of powerful functionality in them.

My project aims to research moving this balance of power and functionality from the application to the database and getting the database system itself to do some of the “thought” and not just mindlessly passing data back.

This is a research project mainly because I have some idea of how much this can be done and how to do it, but really, I’m not aware of this being done before and everyone I have talked to about it who has any idea what I’m talking about agrees this is an interesting concept and I would be nice to see how far it can be pushed, but really, we have no idea.

For now thought I just need to start with the basics. I need to have PHP (my chosen language) connecting and talking to MSSQL (my chosen database system) before I can go much further. This is proving more challenging than first thought. Watch this space….