We are developping an application that access various databases using the
correspondng JDBC drivers. We actually would like to actually extend this
fonctionality to XML files. In fact we would like to view our XML files
as tables and perform all kind of SQL statments on them. We do not wish to
make specific programming for that but use standard JDBC interfacing. Does
anyone know of any JDBC driver for accessing XML files preferably a type 4
driver ?
In
general, creating a relational view of an XML infoset is possible but
difficult, and the result is likely to be fairly unusable because of the
number of joins needed. In special cases, where you are using XML to represent
a two-level hierarchy, it can be done quite nicely (as is shown by some of the
Microsoft and Oracle products). The problem is (a) that the solution for
the special case is likely to be very different from the solution for the
general case, and (b) restricting yourself to two-level hierarchies is hardly
a very effective way of exploiting XML.
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@ntlworld.com
work:
Michael.Kay@softwareag.com
