Many people begin their relationship with ColdFusion out of a need to provide web-based access to data stored in a database. This might be as simple as wanting to output the contents of a single database table as an HTML table or as sophisticated as a multipage report generated from several related tables in a database. Whatever your requirements, the methods for querying the data from the database and outputting the results to a user’s web browser using ColdFusion remain the same.
ColdFusion doesn’t stop with allowing you to query data from a database. Using ColdFusion, you can perform a wide range of database operations including adding, updating, and deleting records; adding new columns to existing tables; and creating, altering, and dropping existing tables. In this chapter, we cover the basics you need to know in order to use ColdFusion to interact with a database. Included in the discussion are configuring data sources, an introduction to SQL, and techniques for retrieving and displaying data.
Get Programming ColdFusion MX, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
