Re: [xml-dev] Caught napping!

[Dan Weinreb <dlw@exceloncorp.com>]

   Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 14:00:03 -0800
   From: Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>

						   It makes more sense to
   use a native XML database when a relational database won't do.

Yes, but it also sometimes makes sense to use one when you're living
and breathing XML everywhere already anyway, and it's just easier to
deal with everything as XML.

   >  We want it
   > to be a document, so that we can email it to each other, so that we
   > can both look at it in a text editor, and so on.

   But this doesn't imply it has to be stored in a native XML database as
   opposed to a relational database.

That's true.  I was replying to your question "why didn't you just use
a relational database in the first place"?  In the example I cited, I
was saying why the ebXML designers didn't design CPA's as a set of
tables, but rather made CPA's be XML documents.  You certainly can
store the data that a CPA represents in a relational database if you
have reason to do so.

   >  If the information
   > were stored in a relational database, it would not be as convenient
   > to transmit the data from one place to another nor to look at it.

   I think this depends entirely on the structure of the document. For
   purely document-centric documents, this is true and for purely
   data-centric documents, it probably isn't. There's a nice, big gray area
   in the middle :)

All I mean is that XML documents, being documents, are convenient.
You can read them into Emacs and gaze at them.  I could put one
into this very email so easily:

<book>
  <title>Data and Reality</title>
  <author>William Kent</author>
</book>

whereas if I wanted to send you a relation, well, I don't know how to
express a relation in running text inside an email.  (I don't even
know a MIME type for a relation.)