Understanding the Theory Behind Yahoo Pipes
Before we get into Pipes, let’s have a basic understanding of what a database is. A database is a repository of many records. Let’s say there is a database of people and each record contains first name, last name, street address, city, state, and zip. You want to find someone name Smith in a New York City zip code. You can query (ask) the database in several ways. You can ask for last name = Smith. But that would give you everyone named Smith in the database. Ok, you narrow it down to last name = Smith and city = New York City. That query returns fewer records but still too many. Now you ask for last name = Smith, city = New York City and zip = 20001. If you know Smith’s first name you can narrow it down even further by adding first name = Joe. Now you get a list of people name Joe Smith living in the 20001 zip code in New York City.
If there are 2 databases and one has name, address, etc. and the other has name and eye color, you can query both by name and get the address (from database 1) and eye color (from database 2). This is the principle of building a Pipe.
Think of the internet as a huge database. You can query this database using a search engine like Google. If you want to know about Japanese Beetles in the garden, you can type ‘garden’ into Google and get (right now) 617,000,000 records. If you type ‘garden pests’ into your search box you will get (right now) 1,470,000 records - but still too many. Now try ‘garden pests Japanese beetles. This returns 354,000 records. See how you are narrowing it down more and more. The more specific you can be, the fewer records you have to look at to find what you really want.
This is the theory. Next: building your first Pipe.
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POSTED IN: Yahoo! Pipes
1 opinion for Understanding the Theory Behind Yahoo Pipes
b5media - a global blog network - Tech Channel Roll: IE7 Flaws, Happyslip, and Pipes as a Series of Tubes
Feb 28, 2007 at 9:54 am
[…] Last week I was listening to Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast and they did a small feature on Yahoo! Pipes, which is basically visual way of looking at the Internet. Over at A Feed is Born, Cathy Perkins has done a series of articles about Pipes, from a hands on perspective to the theory behind it — thus proving that the Internet is indeed “a series of tubes.” […]
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