Chapter 9: Application Development

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Application Architectures

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application Architectures
 Application layers
 Presentation or user interface
 model-view-controller (MVC) architecture
– model: business logic
– view: presentation of data, depends on display device
– controller: receives events, executes actions, and returns a
view to the user
 business-logic layer
 provides high level view of data and actions on data
– often using an object data model
 hides details of data storage schema
 data access layer
 interfaces between business logic layer and the underlying
database
 provides mapping from object model of business layer to relational
model of database

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application Architecture

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Business Logic Layer
 Provides abstractions of entities
 E.g., students, instructors, courses, etc
 Enforces business rules for carrying out actions
 E.g., student can enroll in a class only if she has completed
prerequsites, and has paid her tuition fees
 Supports workflows which define how a task involving multiple
participants is to be carried out
 E.g., how to process application by a student applying to a university
 Sequence of steps to carry out task
 Error handling
 E.g. what to do if recommendation letters not received on time
 Workflows discussed in Section 26.2

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Object-Relational Mapping
 Allows application code to be written on top of object-oriented data
model, while storing data in a traditional relational database
 Alternative: implement object-oriented or object-relational database
to store object model
 Has not been commercially successful
 Schema designer has to provide a mapping between object data and
relational schema
 E.g., Java class Student mapped to relation student, with
corresponding mapping of attributes
 An object can map to multiple tuples in multiple relations
 Application opens a session, which connects to the database
 Objects can be created and saved to the database using
session.save(object)
 Mapping used to create appropriate tuples in the database
 Query can be run to retrieve objects satisfying specified predicates

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Object-Relational Mapping

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Object-Relational Mapping and Hibernate (Cont.)

 The Hibernate object-relational mapping system is widely used

 Public domain system, runs on a variety of database systems
 Supports a query language that can express complex queries
involving joins
 Translates queries into SQL queries
 Allows relationships to be mapped to sets associated with objects
 E.g., courses taken by a student can be a set in Student object
 See book for Hibernate code example
 The Entity Data Model developed by Microsoft
 Provides an entity-relationship model directly to application
 Maps data between entity data model and underlying storage, which
can be relational
 Entity SQL language operates directly on Entity Data Model

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.8 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Web Services
 Allow data on Web to be accessed using remote procedure call mechanism
 Two approaches are widely used
 Representation State Transfer (REST): allows use of standard HTTP
request to a URL to execute a request and return data
 Returned data is encoded either in XML, or in JavaScript Object
Notation (JSON)
 Big Web Services:
 Uses XML representation for sending request data, as well as for
returning results
 Standard protocol layer built on top of HTTP
 See Section 23.7.3

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.9 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Disconnected Operations
 Tools for applications to use the Web when connected, but operate locally
when disconnected from the Web
 Make use of HTML5 local storage

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Rapid Application Development
 A lot of effort is required to develop Web application interfaces
 More so, to support rich interaction functionality associated with Web
2.0 applications
 Several approaches to speed up application development
 Function library to generate user-interface elements
 Drag-and-drop features in an IDE to create user-interface elements
 Automatically generate code for user interface from a declarative
specification
 Above features have been in used as part of rapid application
development (RAD) tools even before advent of Web
 Web application development frameworks
 Java Server Faces (JSF) includes JSP tag library
 Ruby on Rails
 Allows easy creation of simple CRUD (create, read, update and
delete) interfaces by code generation from database schema or
object model

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application Performance

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.13 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Improving Web Server Performance
 Performance is an issue for popular Web sites
 May be accessed by millions of users every day, thousands of
requests per second at peak time
 Caching techniques used to reduce cost of serving pages by exploiting
commonalities between requests
 At the server site:
 Caching of JDBC connections between servlet requests
– a.k.a. connection pooling
 Caching results of database queries
– Cached results must be updated if underlying database
changes
 Caching of generated HTML
 At the client’s network
 Caching of pages by Web proxy

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.14 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application Security

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.15 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 OWASP TOP 10 2021 (The Open Worldwide Application Security Project)

17
Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.17 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Cross Site Scripting

 HTML code on one page executes action on another page

 E.g., <img src =
http://mybank.com/transfermoney?amount=1000&toaccount=14523>
 Risk: if user viewing page with above code is currently logged into
mybank, the transfer may succeed
 Above example simplistic, since GET method is normally not used
for updates, but if the code were instead a script, it could execute
POST methods
 Above vulnerability called cross-site scripting (XSS) or cross-site
request forgery (XSRF or CSRF)
 Prevent your web site from being used to launch XSS or XSRF
attacks
 Disallow HTML tags in text input provided by users, using functions
to detect and strip such tags
 Protect your web site from XSS/XSRF attacks launched from other
sites
 ..next slide

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Cross Site Scripting

Protect your web site from XSS/XSRF attacks launched from other sites

 Use referer value (URL of page from where a link was clicked)
provided by the HTTP protocol, to check that the link was followed
from a valid page served from same site, not another site
 Ensure IP of request is same as IP from where the user was
authenticated
 Prevents hijacking of cookie by malicious user
 Never use a GET method to perform any updates
 This is actually recommended by HTTP standard

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.19 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Password Leakage

 Never store passwords, such as database passwords, in clear text in

scripts that may be accessible to users
 E.g., in files in a directory accessible to a web server
 Normally, web server will execute, but not provide source of
script files such as file.jsp or file.php, but source of editor backup
files such as file.jsp~, or .file.jsp.swp may be served
 Restrict access to database server from IPs of machines running
application servers
 Most databases allow restriction of access by source IP address

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.20 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application Authentication
 Single factor authentication such as passwords too risky for critical
applications
 Guessing of passwords, sniffing of packets if passwords are not
encrypted
 Passwords reused by user across sites
 Spyware which captures password
 Two-factor authentication
 E.g., password plus one-time password sent by SMS
 E.g., password plus one-time password devices
 Device generates a new pseudo-random number every minute,
and displays to user
 User enters the current number as password
 Application server generates same sequence of pseudo-random
numbers to check that the number is correct.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.21 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application Authentication
 Man-in-the-middle attack
 E.g., web site that pretends to be mybank.com, and passes on
requests from user to mybank.com, and passes results back to user
 Even two-factor authentication cannot prevent such attacks
 Solution: authenticate Web site to user, using digital certificates, along with
secure http protocol
 Central authentication within an organization
 Application redirects to central authentication service for authentication
 Avoids multiplicity of sites having access to user’s password
 LDAP or Active Directory used for authentication

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Single Sign-On

 Single sign-on allows user to be authenticated once, and applications can

communicate with authentication service to verify user’s identity without
repeatedly entering passwords
 Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard for exchanging
authentication and authorization information across security domains
 E.g., user from Yale signs on to external application such as acm.org
using userid [email protected]
 Application communicates with Web-based authentication service at
Yale to authenticate user, and find what the user is authorized to do by
Yale (e.g., access certain journals)
 OpenID standard allows sharing of authentication across organizations
 E.g., application allows user to choose Yahoo! as OpenID
authentication provider, and redirects user to Yahoo! for authentication

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.23 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application-Level Authorization
 Current SQL standard does not allow fine-grained authorization such as
“students can see their own grades, but not other’s grades”
 Problem 1: Database has no idea who are application users
 Problem 2: SQL authorization is at the level of tables, or columns of
tables, but not to specific rows of a table
 One workaround: use views such as
create view studentTakes as
select *
from takes
where takes.ID = syscontext.user_id()
 where syscontext.user_id() provides end user identity
 End user identity must be provided to the database by the
application
 Having multiple such views is cumbersome

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.24 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Application-Level Authorization (Cont.)
 Currently, authorization is done entirely in application
 Entire application code has access to entire database
 Large surface area, making protection harder
 Alternative: fine-grained (row-level) authorization schemes
 Extensions to SQL authorization proposed but not currently
implemented
 Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD) allows predicates to be added
transparently to all SQL queries, to enforce fine-grained authorization
 E.g., add ID= sys_context.user_id() to all queries on student
relation if user is a student

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Audit Trails
 Applications must log actions to an audit trail, to detect who carried out
an update, or accessed some sensitive data
 Audit trails used after-the-fact to
 Detect security breaches
 Repair damage caused by security breach
 Trace who carried out the breach
 Audit trails needed at
 Database level, and at
 Application level

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.26 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 End of Chapter 9

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 9.33 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan