RE: XML versus Relational Database

[Dylan Walsh <Dylan.Walsh@Kadius.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Kimbro Staken [SMTP:kstaken@dbxmlgroup.com]
> Sent:	Friday, February 02, 2001 5:44 PM
> To:	Dylan Walsh
> Cc:	soumitra@b-bop.com; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject:	Re: XML versus Relational Database
> 
>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.

Might their not be a greater hit in assembling all the DOM nodes, coming
back in pieces, compared to reading the whole XML document in one database
operation and parsing it in your application? There has got to be an
overhead in reading/writing possibly thousands of items of data, using many
queries, instead of a single read/write of a text blob.

Last summer I asked a question about how best to store XML in an RDBMS. One
response likened the decomposition approach to taking your car apart every
night when you park it, and rebuilding it in the morning.