xml-dev - Re: Is this Impossible !!

["Steven Livingstone" <ceo@citix.com>]

Marks points are what I think.

> > *Your* point about not querying XML is totally
> > valid since the database is going to do
> > that querying and sorting much faster over
> > non-trivial amounts of data than
> > doing it in an XML document.

I think we just have to look at the current search engines to see how
ineffective pure SQLcan be.
I agree it is faster, but that is where we need to think of querying *both*
SQL and XML.  It may be a perfomance impact, but this is up to the server to
do it as quickly as possible (compare 300 very good searches against the
39439246 altavista results). The client (at least in XMLRPC and SOAP) wants
a relevent answers and XML can provide this (rather than having to re-query
the response constantly++).

This is imperative for (remote) data sources. Indeed, much of my work in XML
is working with remote (wire) services where local processing speed is not
really an issue (relatively speaking).

Cheers,
Steven


----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Birbeck <Mark.Birbeck@iedigital.net>
To: <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 1999 6:48 PM
Subject: RE: Is this Impossible !!


> Steve Muench wrote:
> > *Mark's* point about SQL is totally valid
> > if what that means is that end-users
> > would have to type-in SQL statements as
> > their "user experience".
>
> Steve,
>
> My point is not about users typing in queries!!
>
> What if I write an application on my server that queries your server
> every day for new product information which is then stored in my
> database for local retrieval. Everyone has agreed that you should give
> me that data as XML (well everyone on this list, at least). But if you
> accept the query in some XML form as well, then you can do whatever you
> want with your data storage and I don't need to change my code.
>
> Your approach is fine for 'local' data - where you are very close to it,
> and have a lot of control over it. But the future will surely bring
> increasingly complex aggregations of data, where servers are talking to
> other servers before returning results sets. For example, how would I
> phrase a query to my server that returns results from two other
> databases - one relational, one object - especially if I don't control
> those other servers? With my approach, my server is like a large XML
> document and the two other servers are simply nodes within my document -
> and the lot can be queried with the same syntax.
>
> I've tended to use the term 'XML Server' to describe a server that can
> do this - XML in and XML out. Whether the XML is then stored as XML or
> in a relational or object store is only relevant to the server owner. To
> the outside world the are just dealing with a very large XML document. I
> wouldn't take that as knocking your RDBMS, Steve. I'm simply saying that
> people should put a layer over your product that hides the fact that it
> is an RDBMS. To do this they will need to convert the incoming queries
> to match the structure they have used.
>
> > *Your* point about not querying XML is totally
> > valid since the database is going to do
> > that querying and sorting much faster over
> > non-trivial amounts of data than
> > doing it in an XML document.
>
> I'm also saying you do the query in the 'native' format - that's
> obvious. My point is that you arrive at the native query by converting a
> more abstract, node query - XPath, XQL or whatever.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
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