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I'm new to website design and am building/learning how to put together a data driven website that will help users with calorie/ vegetarian types of queries. My question is for big sites like DailyBurn, SparkPeople do they rent a database or build their own? I know users data is stored on their sites, so do they have separate db's for user input and calorie output? If someone is building their site from scratch is it better and cheaper to just create their own db's from scratch or pay for an existing one?

The other negative is a site like CalorieKing requires me to show their name on any queries I think even for the paid service which I do not want to do.

Thanks

H

TriBoy
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  • Are you asking 'should I rent a database of calorific information or build my own?' A CMS like Drupal will build the database for you, but not populate it with content - I'm not sure whether you're asking for the former or the latter. – Dan Blows Apr 25 '11 at 00:43
  • Sorry, I need to be more specific. I mean populate it. If I'm building a site that requires a lot of nutrition information, do I need to design/build/populate it or maybe design/build it and obtain existing information to import into it? I'm currently studying about db's but this is more of a real-life question. – TriBoy Apr 25 '11 at 02:18
  • A real example would be using the information from a restaurants menu as far as cals, fat, and whether it's vegetarian or not. Would this be available for sale if someone wanted to use it to populate a feature of their site or does it depend on the restaurant and whether someone has entered that kind of information in a db somewhere? – TriBoy Apr 25 '11 at 02:26

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They're probably going to be separate tables of the same database.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by creating your own database, but with the advent of AWS they are dirt cheap.

Casey Chow
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  • Right, the link points to Amazon Web Services, but as far as the data I need to put into the data base, does that get purchased or do I need to create myself and then import or buy it from someone else and import it? Or does it matter on the kind of data? – TriBoy Apr 25 '11 at 02:22
  • Well, it depends on the data. Obviously it would be unethical to buy user account data, but stuff like food calorie tables are definitely on sale somewhere. – Casey Chow Apr 25 '11 at 02:27
  • I tried googling "food calorie tables database for sale" and besides a link to brothersoft.com who had a few available for free from their servers, not many listings came up. Is this something that's sort of hard to find? – TriBoy Apr 25 '11 at 02:51
  • Thanks digitxp. I'm reading up on db's in general. I'm going to do some more of that before asking too many more questions that I can probably find answers to in my reading. Thanks for the link though. It's a good example for review. – TriBoy Apr 26 '11 at 04:11