I have question about ASP development. I am looking at purchasing web based software that uses ASP. From my understanding asp pages simply read input and write output to 3rd party databases such as access or SQL. Is this correct? However, I have heard that ASP uses its own databasing structure so no other types of databases are needed. Is there such thing as a straight ASP database? I ask because I need to know if I need to purchase SQL to run the ASP software in question. I guess what I am asking is from an engineering standpoint...I wish to understand the relationship between asp and databasing. I do have web dev experience so I will be able to understand the concepts easily if they are explained to me. Thanks in advance for your information! www.digitalcorruption.net

First, it's necessary to clarify whether we're talking about "classic" ASP pages or ASP.NET pages...There's quite a big difference. Since you didn't specify .NET, I'll assume we're talking about classic ASP pages. From my understanding asp pages simply read input and write output to 3rd party databases such as access or SQL. At the functional level, there's nothing special about ASP as compared to PHP, Perl, ASP.NET, or JSPs. ASP certainly can read input and write to databases, but it can also read info from the databases and write it to the browser, or it can read from static files, or any other data source. It works essentially exactly the same way as PHP, except with VBScript or server-side javascript as the language instead of PHP. ASP can connect to any database that has ODBC capability (mysql, oracle, dbII, sql server, msde, sql server express, access, excel, postgre sql, cvs text files, etc.) Although ASP is commonly used with databases, there's no mandatory coupling of asp and database software. Classic ASP is absolutely the worst server-side scripting technology available today. It is truly crap. If you can find something using ASP.NET instead, you'll be much better off. Hope this answers your question. Good luck, -SN

if you will not store any data you don't need database