Re: [xml-dev] storing XML files

[Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>]

"Champion, Mike" wrote:
> To be fair to my employer's esteemed RDBMS competitors, XML-enabled RDBMS
> systems can always *store* mixed content and sibling-ordered information in
> a BLOB or CLOB. Isn't the issue whether the stored XML can be *queried" in a
> way that reflects the sibling ordering and mixed content?

Good point. Another issue is whether non-XML applications can use the
data without seeing any XML. The answer is yes for XML that is mapped to
tables and no for XML stored in a BLOB.

In many cases, this is good enough. Oracle has a nice example of an
insurance claim that contains a description written in (if I recall
correctly) XHTML. They map the entire description to a BLOB column
without shredding it further. From a data-centric standpoint, this is a
reasonable thing to do, as the granularity of the description
information is the entire description. Obviously, you lose out on the
ability to query the description in an XML way, but for some (no idea
what percentage) data-centric applications, this is OK.

-- Ron