hello people.
I am extremely new to web design, I have read html quite alot I need yo help however to design a database for an inventory that is accessible over the internet. Can I use MS Excel or Access for the inventory database? Which scripting language of php and ASP.NET would be better to use.
Thanx

MySQL is what you would want to use for your database. I would suggest you use PHP to access the MySQL, as is it really use to connect with that.

Thanx.

I have read alot about MySQL being "open source", does this mean it is free?

Yes, is it is free, although that does not automatically mean "open-source". Open-source means that you make your source code available for public viewing. So you can be free but not open-source (although I don't think you can be open source but not free).

You might try a Database-as-a-Service offering such as www.HostedDatabase.com or others which allows you to implement a simple inventory database without the need for server-side programming. You only need a simple HTML interface to your database.

I have some of the data already in MS Excel. Is it not possible to use Excel for the database? Cant php communicate with Excel? What would be the disadvantages of using Excel?

You definitely DON'T want to use Excel as the database, even though you could create a System ODBC DSN pointing to it. Excel is not meant to be a database, and performance would suffer on an active website. With a web-hosted database solution like www.HostedDatabase.com you easily upload a .csv file from Excel into the web database. It takes like 2 minutes. Once there, the data can quickly be accessed using simple HTML.

Thanx men!

It's true that you usually don't want to use Excel as a database since it is not optimized for fast transactions ... but it is not uncommon to use a flat file database (plain text or xml files) when the amount of data to be stored is a small amount. I plan on using Excel csv files for a database on a site I'm developing for three reasons. It provides an immediate administrative interface for managing the inventory data (Excel) for my client; there is only a relatively small amount of inventory to be managed; and it is very portable, I only need PHP running on the server and all of my data is in file-format, not binary DB format .... In this case I feel I won't get a significant performance hit using Excel csv as a database.

If you're in that same boat you can see what I came up with over on this post:
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post66...tml#post663864

Best of luck