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-----Original
Message----- > I have serious doubt that a
native XML database, however well What does ¡°succeed in commercial space¡± mean to you? XML databases often get their foot in
the door by making it easy to store/retrieve the XML that the RDBMS-based
applications generate in order to talk to each other. The question is whether
the hybrid Object-Relational databases will drive the native databases out of
the XML world, not vice-versa. Nobody
replaces working systems with new technology and lives to tell the tale ;~) As for the ¡°failure¡± of OODB ¡ mightn¡¯t this be attributed to the
fact that the RDBMS vendors subsumed their unique capabilities into the current
¡°Object-Relational¡± databases, leaving ¡°native¡± OODBs out in the cold? (I¡¯d bet that there are a lot of OODB vendor
who would quarrel with the word ¡°failure¡± to describe them, but that¡¯s another
matter). The whole question of how to best store, retrieve, query, and
update XML in an efficient, secure, transactional, recoverable, scalable, etc.
way is wide-open, and a lot of creativity is being thrown at the problem. From what I can determine from the
publicly available material, all the ¡°native¡± XML databases use a rather
different underlying approach, and some (like XFinity) even claim to layer ¡°native
XML¡± storage on an RDBMS infrastructure.
Technological evolution and marketplace competition will sort out the
winners and losers ¡ a safe bet is that if Oracle/IBM/Microsoft dominate the
XML database market the way they do the RDBMS market today, it will be with
hybridized ¡°Object-Relational-XML¡± technology rather than ¡°pure¡± RDBMS
technology. For example, it would
appear from press reports that Oracle will support some sort of ¡°XML SQL
datatype¡± in 9i. That sounds to me like someone in
Redwood Shores doesn¡¯t completely buy your vision of ¡°implementing XML data structure on a relational
database and map all desired features to RDBMS features.¡±
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