xml-dev - RE: XML Repositories

[Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@icl.com>]

>         Being a newbie to the group I have what I consider a 
> burning question, but has probably already been hashed out. If someone
would 
> point me in the right direction I would be quite appreciative. Basically I
need to 
> make some decisions regarding my position on Repositories for XML data, 
> specifically Computer Based Training developed in XML. There will be
thousands of courses 
> residing in the repository, served up world wide.
>         My initial position was to go with an Object Database, in
particular
> something built around a solution like POETS Content Management System.
However,
> there have been many individuals that dislike this idea, and balk at the
idea of
> leaving the safety of the well know RDBMS community.

We've made this journey and learnt quite a few lessons from it.

We were using an object database (an early version of Jasmine), but after a
couple of years we reverted to relational databases. The reasons:

- people were storing data in very fine-grained form and it took ages to
reassemble for display. It's better to store the data relatively
coarse-grained and split it up (by parsing) when you need to.

- we hit a skills bottleneck, there were only a few gurus who understood the
technology

- the class library was getting ridiculously complex, we weren't achieving
enough re-use across different projects to justify the generality of the
infrastructure

- we hit immaturity problems with the technology (e.g. lack of low-level
performance monitoring and tuning tools) - the kind of boring things where
20-year-old products like ORACLE really score.

Regards,

Mike Kay

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