Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database

Whether you want to build your own forum, publish the messages from a mailing list on your Website, or write your own CMS: there will be a moment that you'll want to store hierarchical data in a database. And, unless you're using a XML-like database, tables aren't hierarchical; they're just a flat list. You'll have to find a way to translate the hierarchy in a flat file.

Van Tulder, Gijs. SitePoint (2004). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Databases

Consistency-Preserving Caching of Dynamic Database Content  

With the growing use of dynamic web content generated from relational databases, traditional caching solutions for throughput and latency improvements are ineffective. We describe a middleware layer called Ganesh that reduces the volume of data transmitted without semantic interpretation of queries or results. It achieves this reduction through the use of cryptographic hashing to detect similarities with previous results. These benefits do not require any compromise of the strict consistency semantics provided by the back-end database. Further, Ganesh does not require modifications to applications, web servers, or database servers, and works with closed-source applications and databases. Using two benchmarks representative of dynamic web sites, measurements of our prototype show that it can increase end-to-end throughput by as much as twofold for non-data intensive applications and by as much as tenfold for data intensive ones.

Tolia, Niraj and M. Satyanarayanan. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Databases