Re: [xml-dev] XML Database Decision Tree?

[Soumitra Sengupta <soumitra@b-bop.com>]

Tim Bray wrote:

>
> So....... Mike, perhaps you and some of the other XDBMS purveyors
> could give us some examples of the places this stuff latches onto?
>  -Tim
>

There are 2 "places" we are seeing "this stuff" latching on as far as paying
customers are concerned.

1. Storing and Retrieving XML documents

The specific areas we have seen this happen are in Financial Research
Reports, Course Material (eLearning), Training Manuals, News Feeds.  Pretty
much where SGML was strong.  The only difference is, the adoption of XML is
filtering down to users who never saw SGML.  We have customers who tried to
"munge" it into RDMS using proprietary schemas as well as customers who
stored their XML on a file system and used some sort of text indexing.  They
found both approaches fell short of their needs as far as performance and
scalability was concerned.

2. Storing and Retrieving Transaction Messages

This is a totally new class of problem.  We have several customers who wanted
to store the envelope of B2B messages for audit and reporting purposes.  The
payload is usually getting mapped into proprietary relational schemas.  They
have 2 problems that our XDMS solves: they need to deal with message
envelopes with arbitrary structure and they need to query across these
message envelopes to generate reports.

We have paying customers in both these categories.

Now putting on the "faraway look in my eyes" (I am a techie after all and
like to solve hard problems), I can see XDMS's applied in the following areas
as well:
a) a virtual db for data integration (customer model, patient record are 2
areas I can think of)
b) repository of semi-structured data like product specification

Soumitra