Master's Degree: Technical Information

INTRODUCTION

This class will discuss a bit of technical information about the technical operations of the IMDb.

QUESTIONS ANSWERED

• How does it work?

LESSON 1: THE SOFTWARE

The first thing we suggest is reading the IMDb History to find out more about how this all started and how we have arrived at our present point.

The IMDb began as a set of shell scripts and data files. In a way, it remains true to the elementary structure it started with when it was created by Col Needham back in 1990.

The Database itself takes advantage of Perl's built-in support for the Berkeley DBM database structure, and almost the entirety of the software we use to make our database searchable by our users is written in Perl. It has been developed in-house over the past nine years. The only C code in the entire site is our fuzzy search routines. These too were also developed in house and tuned for their application to searching for the names of people and titles.

To serve our site, we use the Apache web server, using the mod_perl extensions for tighter integration of the server and database.

To provide our message boards, we use the WWWThreads discussion forum system, which we have customized in-house in appearance and functionality for our specific uses.

LESSON 2: THE HARDWARE

Our U.S. based servers operate on Linux.

Our European-based servers are high-end Intel-based PC's, running FreeBSD Unix.

LESSON 3: OTHER FUN STUFF

Database Statistics

If you would like a detailed breakdown on the variety of data we have in the database, you can visit our database statistics page.

Running Your Own Copy of IMDb

The IMDb stays true to its Internet roots and core principles, thus we make available all the files and software to construct a copy of the database on your own PC (for private, non-commercial use only). For more information on how to do this and the supported operating systems, please visit our alternate interfaces page.

IMDb's Privacy Policy

For more information the data we collect from/about our users, please read our privacy policy.

CONGRATULATIONS

If you have gone through the IMDb University from start-to-finish, you can consider yourself a full graduate with a Master's Degree in IMDb. If you actually go so far as to successfully install and run your own copy of the IMDb as mentioned above... consider yourself an IMDb PhD.

We hope this series of "classes" on how to get the most our of (and into) our site has been useful and enjoyable. Thank you for your interest.