Advanced IVR Tutorial Lesson 2: Learn About Relational Database

There are plenty of information online about relational databases and there are free database software programs that you can download and use. Notable free databases are:

• Microsoft SQL Server Express
• MySQL

For more information please check the individual vendor's website. The rest of this lesson will make use of Microsoft SQL Server.

Create a database instance for the sample

In order to make the sample work, you need to create a database instance named AP. If you are using Microsoft SQL Server, you can use Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio to create a new database instance.

Once have created this database instance, you need to create a database table named CustomerPassword. This table should contain two columns: Account_Id and Account_Password. Then populate the table with some initial data.

This table basically sets the passwords for account 101 and 102.

Create a database user

You also need to create a database user account for accessing the database instance. With Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, create a new user under Security and Login. For example, you can name the user test and set the password to testivr.

Double click on the newly created user test and from the Login Properties window, choose User Mapping. Select the database instance AP, make sure to select db datareader, and db datawriter roles.

Download the JDBC driver

IVR Studio and Voicent Gateway use Java as the programming language for applications. The Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API is the industry standard for database-independent connectivity between the Java programming language and a wide range of databases SQL databases and other tabular data sources, such as spreadsheets or flat files. The JDBC API provides a call-level API for SQL-based database access. For more information, please check out Sun Microsystem's Java site.

You should be able to download the JDBC driver of your database from the vendor's website.