Creating a Database for our site - Part 1

Before we can proceed with data handling, we need a database to store our product data. In this section, we will learn how to store data in a SQL Server 2005 Express database.

First, let us make a list of the data that we need to store. We will keep our database simple, so here is what we need to store:

• ISBN - The International Standard Book Number of the book.
• Book Name- The name of the book.
• Author Name - Author of the book
• Publisher Name - Publisher of the book
• Category - Category of the book such as ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET etc.

We also need some sample data. The table shown below contains the details of some books. We will use this data for our project purpose.

Now that we have some sample data, let us store this data in a database. As we have discussed earlier, we will use SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for the database. Note that although the database will be stored in SQL Server 2005 Express, we can access and work with the database through the VWD IDE.

We will now create a database and add a table in it for storing the data:

• Open the project if it is not already open. Move the mouse pointer on the `Database Explorer' tab to make it visible. As shown in the figure below, right click on the Data Connections and select the Add Connection... option from the menu.