Airline Database Question

beezer

I've been doing web stuff for a while, and recently been using mysql quite a bit. I'm getting rather good at it 🙂

My question is this: How does a database like Northwest Airlines' work? Like, If I want to fly out from ALO - AMS, how does it know that there's x flights per day, i have to connect in MSP, and all that jazz? I was thinking maybe it had all possible routes in the db, but that would be insanely huge...

Is there an article or anything like that? I'm just curious... there's really no reason for me to ask, I'm just wondering how they do it, and if what they do could possibly help me one of these days.

Thanks everyone!

Scott

victordb

All the information is stored in different fields and then accessed when needed.

beezer

Well, how are they actually set up? Like, waht is the structure, and what is the SQL to get each field? etc...

ultraslacker

I was thinking maybe it had all possible routes in the db, but that would be insanely huge..

Well, they are running on insanely huge systems capable of processing thousands of transactions per second.

Do a search for Sabre - there should be papers written on this system as it was groundbreaking.

mrmufin

All airline reservations and route and flight information are managed by a "Central Reservation Service" (CRS). There are a handful of gateway servers which link into the CRS, the most popular is Sabre. http://www.sabre.com.

After agreeing to 'plentiful' non-disclosure statement, and filling out a few questionaires, you can download API's to interact with the CRS via Sabre. However, usage of this interface is not free; not even a little...

It's been a while since I've read through the Sabre shtuff, but to the best of my knowledge, their gateways to the CRS will not support 'scripted' programming languages, like PHP, Perl, etc...