Re: XML versus Relational Database

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Dream Catcher wrote:

> Hello,
>
>  Although I am developing an application for securing XML data. This
> morning I woke up and came out a general question: Is it really a better
> idear to store data in XML structure instead of relational table? As we
> know to bulid a DOM tree is quite expensive for main memory...Any advice
> and opinion are cherished...:-)

It totally depends on your application needs, and often the size of the
database. For example, on one of my web sites (a news/articles portal) I
store all of the headlines in RSS files. This is good enough, because
there aren't that many articles. And I query them with XPath. But if the
numbers were to extend beyond say 500 records I'd want to think about
archiving some away somehow, because it would become too slow.

Note that there are some really strong reasons not to just use XML files
as a replacement for an RDBMS, most importantly ACID transactions (I get
around this with atomic renames, but its not a great substitute).

-- 
<Matt/>

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