Personal Online Database Features

DB Characteristics
Html Interface
DB Data Storage
Installation and Conversion
Search and Sort
Security over the Net

DB Stability on Hardware or Software Failure
DB Administration and Options
DB Error and Statistics Report

Html Interface

  1. Html interface completely customizable. Unlike with some software where you do not actually have complete control over the so-called fully customizable html interface, with POD you can practically design the html interface completely by yourself. Then you add a set of POD-specific tags to let POD provide data to be displayed in your page. In one sentence, you provide the interface, POD takes care of the data and display. In fact, you can even use a different language like Spanish or Chinese for your DB when you design your own interface. In addition, if you do not want to design your own html interface, a variety of templates are included for a quick setup of your DB.
  2. Support text boxes, drop-down menus, and multi-line text boxes for displaying DB data in an html form. Support displaying plain data anywhere in the html file.
  3. All DB operations and administration can be done through web browser.
  4. Both POST and GET methods are supported, which means you can link any DB search from any html page.
  5. Search results can be displayed on multiple pages. You can specify how many entries to be displayed per page, and how many pages to be displayed per section (one section is defined as the collection of the pages displayed between <prev page> and <next page> links).
  6. Maximum number of entries returned in a search can be specified to prevent unecessary searches.
  7. Special tags enable sorting results on any item. (see Search and Sort for details).

DB Data

  1. Store different data types. You can specify the stored item as a string, a number, a phone (number), or a time (stamp). By specifying string, you can practically store any text into your database and have it sorted lexicographically. By using different data types the data will be sorted correctly and/or displayed uniformly for aesthetic purposes.
  2. Store image links. You can specify DB items to be image links, and POD will intelligently replace the <img> tags in your html file with the image links stored in DB. This is best suitable for product catalogue, etc.
  3. Store email and www links. These work similar to image links, except that they will be automatically linked when displayed.
  4. Store a hit counting item in DB. You can specify an item to be a hit counting item and specify the initial value of the item when the DB entry is first added to the DB. When your customer or user viewed that entry, the hit counting item will be automatically incremented to reflect the interest in this entry. This is best suitable for tracking interest in your product catalogue, etc.
  5. Store multiple time stamp items in the DB. You can specify to let POD enter the time stamp for you using current system time, or enter the time stamp yourself. The time stamp is Y2K compliant and will be sorted intelligently. However, like many other software products, if the time stamp is earlier than 1/1/70 or later than 2025, the sort function on such items may not work correctly even though the stamp will be stored and displayed correctly.
  6. Time stamp can be displayed and input in 4 different format.
  7. Convert items even after your DB is created. You can let POD to change the names, sizes, or order of the items in the database, and POD will correctly transform your DB to new DB schema (as a precaution, please back up your DB first before you convert just in case unforseen event happens during conversion).
  8. Specify which items in an entry are required to be non-empty for the entry to be considered valid. This way you can avoid getting empty entries into the DB that do not make sense.
  9. Specify the size of the items in your database entries. The sizes can be later changed as described above.

Installation and Conversion

  1. Starting from V5.0, installation support is not included because ALL you need to do is copy some files into assigned directories following simple instructions, there is no reason to put in an extra 600+ kB files that do not do much.
  2. Convert any csv-styled files into DB format recognized by POD using the companion application module. This way you can export your old DB to csv file, and convert the data to be recognized by POD. This feature is only supported by registered version of POD.
  3. Specify separation character of the csv-styled files. This is just a small conveniency when you do the conversion.

Search and Sort

  1. Search and sort whole DB real fast. The time POD spends on searching and sorting of the DB is usually less than 10% of the time it takes to read the DB file. Therefore the limit on the speed is by the hard disk reading speed of your internet server computer. If you have fast disks on your internet server machine and keeps DB compact, it is not uncommon to do 10,000-50,000 full-text multiple-word search and sort within a second or two. Add, change, delete entries take much less time.
  2. Search up to 10 words at a time. The entry returned during a search will contain ALL the search words.
  3. Combine multiple words into one search word. Just add quotation marks around the words you want to be treated as one word, and those words will serve as one search word during search.
  4. Confine search to partial word. If you put quotation mark on a partial word, the search will only return entries containing that partial word, not those that only contain a complete word. For example, "bed" will return entries like "bed on sale" but not "bedroom".
  5. Sort search results using any criteria. With a specifal set of POD-specific tags, you will be able to tell POD to sort on a search result using any DB item as criteria.
  6. Sort can be either ascending or descending as chosen dynamically in the interface html files as defined by POD-specifc tags. This way you can link sort ascending or descending on the same item even in the same page to let user choose which way THEY like instead of one static sorting order that YOU like (of course, you can choose not to give them this choice)!
  7. In addition to 6, user can toggle sort if they click again on the item they just sorted.
  8. Sort differently according to different data types. This will ensure the correct results be displayed.

Security

  1. Separate passwords for search, add, delete/change entries. You can specify whether the passwords are case-sensitive or not, or if you want to use passwords to protect all or any of the DB operations or not.
  2. Specify passwords on DB-level or Entry-level. You can either use one password for authentication of any entry in the DB or enter separate passwords for each entry in the DB. The latter choice is handy when you want to let each user enter/modify their own entry info, but do not want them to change other people's info.
  3. Specify master password that only you, the DB administrator, knows, and that will override all other passwords.
  4. Separate password for remote administration of DB options (see below for detail).

Stability

  1. Multiple users are allowed to search (READ) the same DB at the same time, allowing POD to achieve a high throughput to meet high user demand.
  2. On the other hand, concurrency handling is added to POD to ensure that no two users will be WRITING to the same DB at the same time, preventing DB from getting corrupted.
  3. Hardware and software failure protection ensures DB file not get corrupted. A special commit-rollback mechnism ensures that all operations are logged and can be rolled back when failure happens.
  4. Multiple DBs are put in different subdirectories while using the same executable file. This way each DB will not affect each other while no space is wasted on multiple DB programs & keeps your cgi-bin directory clean.

DB Administration and Options

  1. DB administration is through html interface. Nearly every option can be configured online.
  2. Remote DB administration is password protected. This password cannot be configured online to ensure security.
  3. DB administration interface is separate from the DB html interface, therefore your users will not be able to accidentally or intentionally breaks your DB configuration.
  4. POD generates a csv file to enable summary of your DB or export to other programs for analysis of your DB data. You can specify which items to be included in the csv file and in which sequence. You can also specify an item on which the csv file should be sorted.

DB Error and Statistics Report

  1. Let DB automatically send e-mail reporting critical errors or periodically send e-mail reporting DB statistics.
  2. DB statistics include specification of maximum of top hit entries (the entries whose hit counting item has the biggest numbers) be reported. How often should POD report stats, to which address the email should be sent, etc. The report will be sorted and contains links to the DB entries to faciliate reviewing the report. Email subjects can be specified with date and time automatically tagged when message is sent.

DB Characteristics

  1. Absolutely no programming knowledge required to use POD. There is no requirement on SQL, Java, JavaScript or any programming/scripting language or skills. As long as you can design your own web pages, you can design your own online database with POD with ease, assuming you have read the instructions and this readme file. If you need to change DB data, it is easy because the DB file is text-based for conveniency. In fact, even if you do not know much about html and cannot design your own pages, you can choose to use the template pages for the sample DBs as your own DB.
  2. Use your own language for html interface. English, Portugese, Spanish, ... Almost any language that can be displayed by your browser. You can even choose Chinese!
  3. Scalable. In theory, the database can support unlimited number of entries. In reality, though, it is best that entries are within tens of thousands. The searching speed will be limited by disk reading speed when DB size reaches more than tens of thousands of entries.
  4. No need to use external DB engines. The DB engine itself is in POD. You do not have to rent a server that supports a DBMS, thereby saving costs and truly making it possible to truly do-it-yourself.
  5. Multiple DBs for the price of one. POD lets you run multiple databases with their own configurations on the same web server. That saves a lot of money which you would not want to waste on some other softwares.
  6. Fast deployment. After an initial learning curve for designing your first DB, designing any more DB will be nearly as easy and fast as writing html files using your favorite text or WYSIWYG editors.
  7. Small tweaks and tricks that you will learn during your customization of the DB, its interface and configurations.
  8. Automatic file upgrade when you install a newer version over a DB with old format.
  9. Free upgrade until the next major version. In addition to enjoying the already very low cost, if you buy version 5.0, you can upgrade for free through maybe V5.1, 5.5, ... until maybe V5.99. But you would have to pay a fee for upgrading to V6.0.
  10. Features that may be implemented in the future: Encryption of the passwords. The password will be encrypted in the DB, disabling reading them directly in text editors. A small GUI program will be provided for changing password. Full support for Linux/Unix. Currently, POD only works for Win9x/NT/2000. Some Windows OS may not work for POD (e.g. if your OS has an old version of the dll files POD requires and you did not install Windows service packs, POD may not function correctly). Integrated shopping cart. You will be able to make a product catalogue using POD, and let users order directly using POD.