Shift it to the Server!-Let the Database Server Update Your Websites

From the beginnings of the World Wide Web, Web site administrators have used dynamically generated HTML pages to provide up-to-date information, e.g., online news, stock quotes, etc. Due to the high resource consumption of dynamic page generation approaches, many sites have switched over to periodical updates of frequently visited pages, e.g., a headline index of an electronic newspaper. However, this approach has led to reduced topicality of information. In this paper, we present iWebDB, an approach for automatic ORDBMS-controlled document updates. It offers up-to-date Web documents and, at the same time, avoids the drawbacks of dynamic page generation approaches. iWebDB is based on the extensibility infrastructure of object-relational database systems. By utilizing DB triggers and so-called user-defined functions, documents can be automatically generated by the DBMS whenever related DB data has been modified.