xml-dev - updategrams

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

Has anyone taken a look at Microsoft's "updategrams" for XML?

>Updategrams define the structure of an XML document that can 
>be used to describe a change to another XML document. The change 
>is described by presenting what a fragment of the document looked 
>like before the change and what the fragment should look like after 
>the change. The before data is used to locate the portion of the 
>document that should be changed. Enough data must be specified so 
>that only one matching fragment can be found in the document. When 
>the portion of the document matching the before data is found, it 
>is changed to match the data specified in the after-data fragment 
>of the updategram. This mechanism also supports optimistic concurrency 
>control because if another user has changed the same portion of the 
>document, the before data won't match and the update will fail. 

They've got a beta up that works with a beta of SQL server 2000, but these
look like they might be useful in other situations as well:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/betas/updategrams.asp

There doesn't appear to be any support for versioning or other
content-management-oriented issues, but it's aimed at a database audience
right now.
Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books