RE: storing xml files into database

[Frank Richards <frichards@softquad.com>]

If you (B-Bop) have this running, I really recommend some technical
marketing -- whitepapers and conference talks.
With my Softquad hat on I can tell you that the CMS market has frustrated
us: The OODBMS based ones haven't scaled well
because Poet and Excelon (the DBMSs) just don't have all the big system
features of Oracle and DB2 -- Astoria and Poet were fine departmental
solutions --, while the relational based ones start painful, but don't get
any worse as you go from a department to the Fortune 500.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Lindsey [mailto:bill@blnz.com]
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 1:08 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: storing xml files into database


Frank Richards wrote:
> XML is a tree of elements. Naively mapping that tree onto a table causes
the
> RDBMS to
> thrash it's guts out doing joins to go down the tree --
[ ... ]
> XML in an
> RDBMS can easily hit six or seven joins per query.

A typical, naive definition of a "nodes" table does lead to unacceptable
performance due to the necessity of many self-joins.  It is possible,
however, to devise a scheme for encoding nodes' context in a compact
form, optimized for an RDBMS' indexing facility, and build a
generic table structure, capable of storing any well-formed
XML, yet does not exhibit the self-join problem.

With this technique, one can:
* leverage the mature ACID properties of commercial RDBMSs
* support any well formed XML with no additional developer or DBA effort
* provide fine-grained, random access to the content of large
collections
* efficiently query on content and/or structure

Bill Lindsey
B-Bop

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