Keeping Web pages up-to-date with SQL:1999

From the beginnings of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) and the definition of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Web site administrators have used dynamically generated HTML pages to provide up-to-date information. 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 provoking less user acceptance. We present iWebDB/DG, the document generator of our integrated Web Content Management System. It guarantees up-to-date Web documents without on-the-fly generation. The approach is based on the extensibility infrastructure of object-relational database systems. By utilizing DB triggers and so-called user-defined functions, documents can automatically be generated by the DBMS whenever data is updated.