There are scores of ways to store, work with, and retrieve data on the web. Simple databases, relational databases, XML, even custom flat files can hold our product catalogs, user information, and other repositories of important stuff that we want to share with the world. There are some logical ways to work with different kinds of data—for example, many people who use MySQL databases for storage will write PHP scripts to hook into their data, because of PHP’s native support for MySQL. On the other hand, XML purists often use XSLT(which is itself also XML) to work with their marked-up files. As web developers, it often comes down to us to make the decisions about how to store new data, and even more importantly, how to work with data that our clients give to us.
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