Build a FAQ with ASP and MS Access

What's Wrong with Access?

Before you take your new-found ASP database skills and go implement a system such as the example I presented in this article on your own site, there is an important issue that you need to be aware of. Microsoft Access was never designed to be used a heavy-duty backend for database-driven Websites. The number of simultaneous connections that it can handle is extremely limited, so if your Website receives more than a handful of visitors at a time, Access will likely not hold up under the strain. A good discussion that covers the limitations of MS Access when used in this way is available here: 15 Seconds: The Truth About Access.

For the reasons explained in that discussion, you'll need to explore alternatives to Access if you want to deploy a database-driven Web application on anything larger than a personal Website. Microsoft would have you invest in their high-powered MS SQL Server, but ASP can connect to free databases such as MySQL just as easily. Fortunately, since the ADO library can be used to connect to all of these databases and more, and they all use SQL (albeit with slightly different dialects) to describe their queries, so the skills you have learned in this article are equally applicable once you move on to a more advanced database backend.

Summary and Resources for Further Reading

In this article, we explored the most basic concepts of using the ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) library in ASP to build Web pages that use a database to store the content to be displayed. For the sake of example, we used a simple Microsoft Access database to build a Frequently Asked Questions system that tracks the number of views each FAQ receives in order to list the questions according to their popularity. Practical systems like this one are in use all over the Web.

Your next steps in the realm of database-driven programming with ASP should be to gain a more complete understanding of Structured Query Language (SQL). An excellent book on the subject that covers not only the concepts you need to know and all the different query types that are available, but also explores the idiosyncrasies of the SQL dialects supported by most of the popular databases out there is Beginning SQL Programming (2001, WROX Press). In addition to the wealth of knowledge you get with this book, you'll also receive a 120-day evaluation version of MS SQL Server 2000!

There's also a lot still to learn about the ADO library, the objects it contains, and their properties and methods. For a relatively thorough introduction to the ADO library and all that it can do for you, I highly recommend Chapters 8 and 9 of Professional ASP 3.0 (1999, WROX Press) (see my review here). For a more in-depth treatment of the subject, however, you can't go past Professional ADO 2.5 Programming (2000, WROX Press). Covering every aspect of ADO, this book will tell you more about the library than you're ever likely to use. This book is definitely for the hard-core database-driven ASP programmer, but likely overkill for the average ASP developer, for whom Professional ASP 3.0 is more than enough.