Re: XML versus Relational Database

[Kimbro Staken <kstaken@dbxmlgroup.com>]

Dylan Walsh wrote:
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From:   Soumitra Sengupta [SMTP:soumitra@b-bop.com]
> Sent:   Thursday, February 01, 2001 6:02 PM
> To:     Dream Catcher
> Cc:     xml-dev@lists.xml.org; xmlschema-dev@w3.org
> Subject:        Re: XML versus Relational Database
> 
> >If you have a few documents and do not need to search across them, a
> >persistent DOM implementation will work
> 
> If you do not need to search across the document, why use a persitent DOM
> implementation?
> Why not store the XML as file or as text in the database?

I believe this was referring to searching across a collection of
documents rather then within a single document. If you do not need to
search across multiple documents then a persistent DOM will work well
for storing a pre-parsed representation of the document.  For handling
multiple documents and querying across them you need to move into an XML
database. By XML database I'm referring to all types as listed here
http://www.xmldb.org/faqs.html 

Storing XML in a file or in a text blob in a RDBMS works fine as long as
you always treat the XML as one atomic unit and can handle the hit of
parsing the document each time it is retrieved from storage. If your XML
is static this works fine but if the application is changing the XML
then a more robust mechanism might be in order.

-- 
Kimbro Staken
Chief Technology Officer
dbXML Group L.L.C
http://www.dbxmlgroup.com