> -----Original Message-----
> From: Caroline Clewlow [mailto:cclewlow@eris.dera.gov.uk]
> Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 4:11 AM
> To: Dream Catcher
> Cc: 'xmlschema-dev@w3.org'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: XML versus Relational Database
>
>
> Isn't the issue that XML is not designed as a mechansim to
> store data, but a
> mechanism to allow data to be provided in a common format that can be
> understood by disparate systems ?
Well, XML was designed for all sorts of things ("SGML for the Web" being
an early slogan). SGML has been used as a storage format in
in some massive document databases for a number of years, so it is a
bit misleading to say that XML was designed just as an exchange format.
Quite a bit of work has gone into designing database products that extend
RDBMS systems to more easily handle XML, build XML stores on top of object
database systems or full-text retrieval systems, and that store XML "natively" in a system optimized for XML querying.
You should check out Ron Bourret's excellent articles on this subject --
what are the implications of storing XML in a database, and what database products
are designed for XML storage? See http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLAndDatabases.htm
and http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLDatabaseProds.htm