Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

2.3 Design of the database part
This chapter presents the database that is used to store the necessary data for the testing
purposes. Database stores the information that is necessary for application configuration, such as
configuration of the search engines and history of queries, which were issued together with engine
rankings for specific queries and algorithms. Surely this data could be stored in the other way, in
files for instance, but since this is not the most elegant, easy to modify and efficient way of
information storage, MySQL relational database was used. Also, any data modifications are easier
than in case of using plain files.
Database schema of the application is not complex, but still this is enough to store necessary
data. Storage is accessed from Java application, namely the Main module through the JDBC
drivers. Schema is constructed in very simple way; there are no computations performed on it, there
are no stored procedures defined in the schema. Those are not needed as application deals with very
simple data. Instead of stored procedures plain SQL and DDL statements are used to retrieve and
update the data contained in it. Next part of the sub-chapter presents the database schema
implementation and descriptions of the tables in the schema.
As stated earlier this schema is very simple and consists only from four tables. Furthermore
there are no stored routines implemented. This makes this schema simple, yet robust enough to
store information necessary for the testing purposes.
17