Connection to database

[Rahul]

Hi all,
Can anybody tell me how to connect to database in miva and also where would i find data base used in miva 5. I am integrating one site with miva5 cart. Need to modify some modules.
On www.outdoorfurnitureplus.com , it displays five products in the bottom. How to do that?
I tried by taking product array on SFNT screen, but it didn't work. Can anybody tell me why is it so?
In miva code where does all database operation occur. I want some basic idea.
Hope you guys will help.

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Basic ideas can be found in the Developers Docs (http://smallbusiness.miva.com/support/docs/api/) on MIVA's website.

[Rahul]

Hi, Thanks for the reply . I read that do***ents. I want to fetch categories from the table. With odbc i can not do that. I am using miva 5 . where does it save this data. How to acess it? I don't want to create new database. I found .dbf file in mivadata folder. But there is no way to find which is of my use? It seems to be very basic question but i got stucked with it. I need help in this regard. I read about mysql database somewhere on this forum. How does miva use it . Which version of miva?

[Rahul]

Hi
I read Makus's article on connection to database. it was for mysql. i've installed my merchant cart using mivasql.
How to connect to mivasql ? What are the tables that are used in miva5.
Markus pls help.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Hi
I read Makus's article on connection to database. it was for mysql. i've installed my merchant cart using mivasql.
How to connect to mivasql ? What are the tables that are used in miva5.
Markus pls help.

You can't connect to mivasql using odbc because mivasql is not a real dbms, it's just a collection of dbase-format dbf files that Merchant opens and closes on each request. You can download these files and look at them using a variety of tools, or even modify them if you're very careful about which tools you use (don't use Excel to modify them for example), but you won't have a way to interact with them in real time remotely. On the server-side, if you do want to have your own custom code modify them, you can use MivaScript or I've heard that there's a perl module that lets perl read and write dbase-format files, not sure if it can deal with Miva's custom extensions on some of the files.

[amcgibbon]

I'm a relative newbie to v.5. I have used v.4 for a while but have never tied a store to SQL. Can you tell me, what is the benefit to doing this? What is actually kept in the SQL database? Where do I configure this in Miva 5?

Thanks for your input.

Andy

[ILoveHostasaurus]

This is something that can only be configured during the initial installation of version 5, you make your choice of mivasql or mysql during the setup and if you choose mysql, it prompts you for the user, pass, host and database name. Merchant will keep all of its normal data in mysql instead of the file-based databases, many third party modules will do this as well but some continue to use the file-based databases as they have that option.

The benefit to having the data in mysql is its efficiency of storing data and retrieving specific data without excess work. In the file-based database world, Mechant would have to open and parse through files, potentially very large files, looking for specific data to retrieve while with mysql it just asks for the specific data it wants and mysql does the work of returning it, but in a much more efficient fashion and it may potentially already have the answer in memory if the same question has been asked before. A Merchant 5 store with hundreds of thousands of products is realistic and still has great performance while the same store on the file-based databases would typically grind to a halt if it received a lot of traffic.