xml-dev - Re: Designing an XML-Database Application

[tpassin@home.com]

Raheja, Dhruv asked about storing and querying XML in databases -
> hello everybody,
>                        i have three q's on my mind....i was hoping someone
> will be able to help.
>
> 1.) Is there any advantage of storing data in XML format versus in a
> object-oriented database that is provided by PDM tools like e-Matrix? Also
> is there any advantage of first converting data into an XML format and
then
> storing it in such a database?
>
> 2.) I want to learn how to connect my XML documents with a database. I
> basically want to be able to store my XML data in a database. I then want
to
> be able to retrieve the data using a front-end that will query the
database
> and display the results using XML.

A lot depends on how much data you will be storing, what kind of queries you
want to do, how regular the structure of the XML documents is, how fast yu
need the responses, and how often (if at all) you need to do updates and
inserts.

If you need to do complex joins, especially ones that were not contemplated
originally, there is still no equal to a relational database.  If the data
structure is very regular, it might easily lend itself to converting to a
RDBMS for storage.

If you don't need joins and your response time can be relatively long, you
might be able to use XSLT/XPath on native xml files.

If your documents have a loose and irregular structure, maybe Phillipe
Lambert's TextML solution would be best.

If you have no money, that makes a difference too!

There is no one answer.

Tom Passin