If I had to name one expert in this area, it would be John Miaso. He basically built 3M's Intranet with Cold Fusion and has become our project guy in this area.

Anyone have any comments on the relative merits of running Oracle, Sybase, Informix or Illustra on a Unix box? Are there a performance issues (if they're even supported) running them on a PC flavor of Unix like BSDI? What are the up and down sides? How good is the website integration?

I've made a little project past semester on database-driven sites with Illustra on a Unix platform. It's slow, working on the server itself, the simplest quey took some seconds to be displayed. Now I'm working with ASP and the comparison is hard from that point of vue. The macro language provided is easy to learn and to use, but not powerful enough, you rapidly need some scripts, to do a variable number of queries for example. For simple commercial use, it's ok, although you better have admin rights not to be rapidly disappointed; but to some research and try on capacities, limits are not far away. Hope this response doesn't come too late..almost a year, wow!

Where, on what website, can we see your work in action. I have a lot more questions but I'd like tot take a look first if possible.

Some great sources for asp (active server pages) training and information: http://www.xs4all.nl/~arjenvm/db_connect/index.html http://www.aspsite.com/ http://www.windows.com/AccessDev/Articles/AcDatWeb/page4.htm http://dynamicnet.net/support/fp/asp.htm http://www.cgocable.net/~dhanson/activeserverpages.html http://www.websiteresources.com/ http://www.majormicro.com/asp-dbs5.html http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/Basics/WebServices/Features/WebAppDev .asp http://202.54.16.99/asp/index.asp

http://www.aspdeveloper.net/ has a great little (very basic) tutorial on connecting your Access database to your website.

http://www.pacific-coast.com/ Christopher O'Connell wrote in a review on the Mining Company: WebCatalog: The Web-Database Connectivity Underdog Dateline: 12/10/98 Last week's feature, "Cold Fusion and ASP Side-By-Side" compared two very popular Web-database connectivity solutions, Allaire's Cold Fusion, and Microsoft's Active Server Pages, by looking at the code behind equivalent Web pages built with the different tools. Shortly after posting the article, I received an e-mail from Micheal O'Se, Senior Technician at www.elive.ie, Internet hosting service, and builders of database-driven Websites, suggesting that I take a look at WebCatalog, by Pacific Coast Software. Micheal said "I had a good long hard look at these products (ASP and Cold Fusion) myself before going down another road which very few people know about. It is called WebCatalog and uses a language called WEBDNA." WebDNA does look a lot cleaner than both CF and ASP, and developers boast it is faster as well. This is because WebCatalog saves the database files in lightweight, tab-delaminated text-files held in the server's RAM for extremely quick access. Micheal said that one site, http://www.compub.com, has a 6,000 record file which takes up only 500k. etc...

Some tool reviews that might be helpful: target="mainbody">Intranet Design Magazine has reviewed 34 tools in a quick and dirty table. Not a lot of depth, but it should show you what's out there. target="mainbody">WebDeveloper.Com has a more indepth review of three Web-to-Database connection tools, (in order of appearance) Cold Fusion, Sapphire/Web, and NetDynamics. target="mainbody">Internet World has a review of seven technologies, from Active Server Pages, through WEBDBC, and gave their top choice to Tango. This review seems to be a bit old, since the versions of some products in the review are a couple of releases old. target="mainbody">CNet's Builder.com looks at three databases that have good web publishing features.