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

[Jeff Lowery <jlowery@scenicsoft.com>]

> I may be digressing, but an implication of an XML DBMS support for
efficient
> storage/retrieval of well-formed XML is that you can get many benefits of
> using a DBMS without going through the agonies of data modelling, database
> design, and performance tuning that RDBMS-based applications traditionally
> suffer.

Gosh, I would still hope we do data modeling: it's part of data analysis.
Once you have it at a conceptual level, you still need to physically
represent it. Although that may be more intuitive (to us) in an XML
containment hierarchy than it would be in a set of relational tables strung
together with joins, there's still more than one way to skin a conceptual
cat, even in XML. 

Same goes for performance tuning. If you don't have the right properties
collocated in the elements, you're going to have a lot unnecessary document
navigation to do. Again, I don't pretend to imagine that doing it right in
XML is as hard as doing it right in an RDBMS, but easiest of all is doing it
wrong in ways multifarious.