Databases are the best way to keep your web site up-to-date and dynamic. Databases are used these days by thousands of web sites. They are used for storing news and general information. Web sites like the ASP Index (www.aspin.com) are run on large databases. Databases make a web site easy to update and once you have the base script, to add, remove and modify things in a database is very easy.
To start you need to know how to connect to a database. ASP can connect to virtually any type, from Microsoft Access to SQL. In this example I'll be using mySQL and OLE DB to connect to it.
mySQL can be downloaded from the mySQL web site (www.mysql.com). You will also need the provider used to connect to it, also available from the mySQL web site.
You may be asking what's OLE DB? I'm used to ODBC and DSN. OLE DB is faster and more stable. It's almost exactly the same.
First we need to connect to the database, because it's a mySQL database you also need to supply a database name. (in mySQL you can have mulitple databases on the same SQL server.)
Set adoDataConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
adoDataConn.Open strConnection
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And now we've connected. Let's pretend we've got a big list of lots and lots of email addresses, here's the contents of our database, it allows me to show you how it works better.