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

[Dan Weinreb <dlw@exceloncorp.com>]

   Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 22:13:18 -0500
   From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>

   My point isn't that data modelling is pointless in an XML DBMS, just that
   it's not absolutely necessary to do a serious data modelling effort in order
   to do get a minimal DBMS application running. Likewise, the default indexing
   scheme may do a pretty good job without any performance tuning, although an
   informed analysis of the data model and the indexing strategy can generally
   improve performance. All this can be VERY useful if you have more types of
   data than you can model, but need to store, retrieve, and query instances of
   them reasonably efficiently.

I'd put it a little bit differently.  I think the question of whether
you model with relations versus XML is really distinct from the
question of when it's important to do Heavy Duty
Design-Analysis-Modelling and Serious Performance Tuning versus when
those things aren't really needed.  The two things are basically
orthogonal.  However, in practice, they end up being linked, because
the "traditional corporate data center" these days almost always uses
RDBMS and almost always does all the heavyweight stuff.

You're right about not needing to do those things to get a minimal DBMS
application going, but that applies even if the minimal DBMS application
is using a relational database system.