xml-dev - Re: XML representation of a Table

["Steve Muench" <SMUENCH@us.oracle.com>]

You can tag things up in a generic row/column way, or in a way that makes
the natural relationships speak themselves more directly.

Pardon my ASCII art below, but if I have some tables in a
database like:

      AUTHOR
       \|/
        |
       /|\
       BOOK
       \|/
        |
      COURSE
       \|/
        |
      TEACHER

If I'm thinking of Courses, then I might want my data in XML
to look like:

 <COURSE>
   <NAME>XML Basics</NAME>
   <TEACHER>
     <NAME>Joe Tags</NAME>
   </TEACHER>
   <BOOKLIST>
     <BOOK>
       <PRICE>50.00</PRICE>
       <NAME>Go, XML, Go!</NAME>
       <AUTHORLIST>
	 <AUTHOR>
	   <NAME>Dr. Seuss</NAME>
	 </AUTHOR>
       </AUTHORLIST>
     </BOOK>
   </BOOKLIST>
 </COURSE>

But if I'm thinking of Teachers I might want:

<TEACHER>
   <NAME>Joe Tags</NAME>
   <COURSELIST>
     <COURSE>
       <NAME>XML Basics</NAME>
       <BOOKLIST>
	 <BOOK>
	   <PRICE>50.00</PRICE>
	   <NAME>Go, XML, Go!</NAME>
	   <AUTHORLIST>
	     <AUTHOR>
	       <NAME>Dr. Seuss</NAME>
	     </AUTHOR>
	   </AUTHORLIST>
	 </BOOK>
       </BOOKLIST>
     </COURSE>
     <COURSE>
       <NAME>History of Markup</NAME>
       <BOOKLIST>
	 <BOOK>
	   <PRICE>18.00</PRICE>
	   <NAME>SGML, a History</NAME>
	   <AUTHORLIST>
	     <AUTHOR>
	       <NAME>Sammy Jones</NAME>
	     </AUTHOR>
	   </AUTHORLIST>
	 </BOOK>
	 <BOOK>
	   <PRICE>28.00</PRICE>
	   <NAME>Zen and the Art of Markup</NAME>
	   <AUTHORLIST>
	     <AUTHOR>
	       <NAME>Tao Bo</NAME>
	     </AUTHOR>
	   </AUTHORLIST>
	 </BOOK>
       </BOOKLIST>
     </COURSE>
   </COURSELIST>
 </TEACHER>

Of course there's no strict need for the <XXXLIST> enclosing tags, but
a browser trying to parse such a "datagram" might appreciate knowing
that a group of something was about to start...

Object relational databases have the ability to predefine a
nested structure as an object and then make metadata about
the structure of that object available to client programs
via data dictionary tables so that they might be written
to generically query and XML-format the data in an intelligent
way. Oracle8 has a feature called Object Views which lets
relational data be viewed as an object structure, so you
could combine these ideas to have your data structuring and
your logical data manipulation in whatever "shapes" make
sense for your app.

____________________________________________________________________________
 Steve  | Consulting PM & XML Technology Evangelist | smuench@oracle.com
 Muench | Java Business Objects Dev't Team          | geocities.com/~smuench

---

• From: petsa@us.ibm.com
• To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
• Date: 21 Oct 98 09:03:34

Two points re. translating from relational tables to XML and back.
1. The example seems reasonable but the fun really starts when you want to
    represent 2 or more joined tables as an XML document.  In general,
    you want to map a SQL view into a XML document and if you have more
   than 1 table in the view its not always clear how to structure the
hierarchy.
2. Omitting a value is *not* the right way to represent a NULL value.
   SQL distinguishes between these 2 cases.  A string column can have an
   empty string as a value or its value can be NULL.  In DCD we recommend
   that you use a special attribute to represent that the value is NULL.

Ashok Malhotra


                                                                   
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Please respond to "Michael Kay" <M.H.Kay@eng.icl.co.uk>


To:   xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
cc:    (bcc: Ashok Malhotra/Watson/IBM)
Subject:  Re: XML representation of a Table




>  I just wrote an application which creates XML file from the table. All
you
>hava to do is to to give the table name and it will generate the XML. My
>Question, i just wanted to know, whether the XML generated is correct.

Sounds a useful application, I'd like to know more about it (especially if
you can do the reverse as well!). You can check whether the XML is
"correct"
(i.e. valid and well-formed) by putting it through any xml parser, I think
xp is one of the strictest. Some test cases you need to check are your
handling of non-ASCII characters and special characters such as "<" in your
data. You also need to consider whether CR/LF characters in your data are
significant: XML treats CR=LF=CRLF which may not be what you want.

One observation, in your DTD all the columns of the table are declared
mandatory, this gives you no way of handling null values (the obvious
representation of a null value is to omit the relevant element).

Another issue you may need to address is that not every SQL table and
column
identifier is a valid XML name. For example, SQL identifiers can contain
spaces.

You will also have to think about how to encode binary (blob) fields.

For large tables your representation is very inefficient in space terms.
Often we don't worry about this in XML work, but relational tables can
reach
gigabytes in size even without all these tags. An alternative I would
consider for large tables is:

<TABLEDEF NAME="ACTION">
  <COLUMNS>
    <COL NAME="ACTION_ID"/><COL NAME="ACTION_DESC"/>  etc
  </COLUMNS>
</TABLEDEF>
<TABLE NAME="ACTION">
<ROW>A<C/>Activate<C/>A<C/>PASSTEST<C/>1998-02-23 09:44:00.000</ROW>
<ROW>...</ROW>
</TABLE>

I don't think the gurus would recommend using empty elements as separators
like this, but it is a perfectly legitimate use of XML.

Finally, a transfer format for relational tables also needs to be able to
represent the metadata; my example heads in this direction.

Regards,
Mike Kay


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