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

[PaulT <pault12@pacbell.net>]

> Suppose you want to park your car in a garage while you're not using
> it.  Should you dismantle your car into bolts, ball bearings, shafts,
> cylinders, and so on, putting all the bolts into nice containers
> clearly marked "bolts", all the ball bearings into nice jars labelled
> "ball bearings", and so on?  When you want to take the car out for a
> drive, you just re-assemble it out of all those pieces by joining them
> together.

If the process of dismantling / re-assembling is really fast and 
robust ( no parts would get lost ), the advantage is that you can 
park 10-1000 times more cars in the same space.  And perhaps 
have more trees in downtown as a side effect. 
 
> Some RDBMS advocates might way, yes, you really should do that.  

There is no 'should', I think. There are different requirments 
in different towns.

> Without a doubt, the features being added to RDBMS's to help them
> "shred" (IBM's word, not mine, nothing pejorative intended!)  XML into
> relations are going to be just the ticket for some people and the
> right solution for some problems.  There's no one right way; it all
> depends on the greater context of what problem you're really trying to
> solve.

Exactly. There is no 'right way'. For example, for many 
'data' tasks mixed content and odering is not needed at all. 

Rgds.Paul.