Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Yiftach Shoolman of Redis Labs about Redis, Open Source licenses, company culture and more. Listen to the podcast here.

An introduction to an application server that allows you to build MySQL user interfaces without programming. Assume you are tasked to write a browser-based, MySQL user interface for the table called CITY. CITY has two columns. The column names are city_name and state_code—each combined are the primary key. Your user interface must enable users to execute the four main SQL operations: select, insert, update and delete. The main characteristics for each operation are:

My last full-time job was manager of a university's database department. Ironically, I know very, very little about databases themselves. I'm no longer in charge of college databases, but I still do have a handful of MySQL servers that run my various Web applications. Apart from apt-get install, I have no idea how to make databases work. Thankfully, help is available.

I love high-level, dynamically typed languages, such as Python, Ruby and JavaScript. They're easy—and even fun—to use. They let me express myself richly, and they lend themselves to code that easily can be reused and maintained. It's no surprise that interest in such languages is on the rise, especially when creating Web applications.

In my last article, I continued looking at the Django Web framework, showing how you can create and modify models. As you saw, Django expects you to describe your models using Python code. The model description is then transformed into SQL and compared with any previous version of the model that might have existed.

In my last two articles, I looked at the Django Web application framework, written in Python. Django's documentation describes it as an MTV framework, in which the acronym stands for model, template and views.

One of the most interesting trends in the computer world during the past few years has been the rapid growth of NoSQL databases. The term may be accurate, in that NoSQL databases don't use SQL in order to store and retrieve data, but that's about where the commonalities end. NoSQL databases range from key-value stores to columnar databases to document databases to graph databases.

I've always loved PHPMyAdmin for managing MySQL databases. It's Web-based, fairly robust and as powerful as I've ever needed. Basically, it's awesome. Today, however, I discovered something better than awesome: Adminer. Although it is conceptually identical to PHPMyAdmin, it is far simpler and far more powerful. How can it be both?

Regular readers of this column won't be surprised to hear that I love both Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. Rails has been my primary server-side Web development framework for about eight years, and it has managed to provide solutions for a large number of consulting and personal projects.

Although it sometimes might seem as if relational databases have gone the way of the dinosaur, making way for non-relational (NoSQL) databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, a very large number of systems still depend on a relational database.

Want to improve the integrity of your data? Place constraints in the database, as well as in your application.

Extend PostgreSQL's capabilities with PostGIS 2.0 and discover all the magic of spatial databases.

I recently moved my personal website from GoDaddy to my home server. I have a business connection at my house, and my site gets little enough traffic that hosting at home on my static IP makes sense. Moving the files wasn't really difficult, I FTP'd them down from the old server, and SFTP'd them up to the new server. Moving the database was a bit more challenging, however.

Even with all of the high quality software available, sometimes you just have to break down and write a custom application, and usually you don't have a lot of time to devote to it. This is the situation I found myself in when my wife started a new business and needed a simple means of tracking sales leads.