hosting complete website in DB (Sql Anywhere)

[Vlad]

Hi, I can create a webservice in DB and define its return type as HTML. Of course I can also write Javascript within the HTML too. My question, is it possible to host a complete website in the DB? Do I still need in this case PHP/ASP? What are the limitations in this regard?

[Vlad]

yes, you can.

but I don't know if this is a good idea. Breck wrote this article, and it is what you probably need: http://sqlanywhere.blogspot.com/2015/01/embedding-fiori-in-sql-anywhere.html
I can tell you that some people in this forum like the idea of having web sites hosted in the DB, there are several advantages. I personally like using server-side languages/frameworks. Supportability is much better.

But this will be a holy war... so to avoid it, the answer is "yes, you can. The link to the blog is above".

[VolkerBarth]

Well, Breck's product Foxhound is a complete website hosted in a database (at least AFAIK), so you may check that out... But as stated by Vlad, if that is reasonable for you will depend on your requirements, say whether the whole website is focussed on data retrieval (as in Breck's case) or not.

[Breck_Carter]

No holy war here 🙂

Limitation 1: If your database is already a CPU bottleneck then maybe loading client GUI logic into stored procedures will not be Happy Times For You... maybe you want to divide-and-conquer when it comes to assigning CPU cycles to CPUs.

Limitation 2: Other than the STRING and LIST functions (which are wonderful, by the way), SQL Anywhere doesn't offer much support for application developers to create that client GUI logic... there is no developer's IDE GUI for generating HTML via Watcom SQL... none... not even a little bit 🙂

For the record, Foxhound's big bottleneck is caused by multiple separate ODBC proxy procedure connections to target databases (max 100 per Foxhound dbsrv17.exe instance, with -gn set to 220). The HTML generation has never ever been a performance problem... but then again, Foxhound only ever has a handful of GUI users.

Historically, Foxhound has had its own share of Queries From Hell, especially when it comes to scrolling through gigabytes of historical data... but QFHs are part of Database Life, nothing to do with this topic 🙂