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Ah, the attack of the relational reactionaries!
This sort of thing has been going around the comp.text.xml newsgroup for
months. I've been wondering how long it would take to get here.
The nature of the attack (or troll) is to set up a straw man and knock it
down, then try to extend that "logic" to question the need for XML anywhere,
anytime. Here is the straw man in the current thread:
> Folks who have said that all the benefits
> of RM can be had in XML...Folks who have
> also said that XML is a "better" technology for large data stores than RM
Of course, any "folks" who said such things would be talking nonsense.
Relational database is a mature technology with mature, trustworthy
suppliers. Relational database has sound theoretical underpinnings, a decent
query language and three decades of performance-tuning experience, but just
as important it has solid implementations that reliably deal with practical
issues like data model evolution, concurrent transaction processing and
backup/recovery. In other words, the management part of database management.
XML is a way to represent structured information as text. It has one
established transform language and a couple more in design. There is no
management component. Comparing it to relational database is like comparing
a glider to an airline.
On the other hand, the notion that XML needs to be justified by some kind of
"proof" is just ludicrous. Technologies are justified by utility.
Thank heaven relational database vendors have more common sense than
relational zealots. The former know that relational database is not
threatened by XML, any more than it was threatened by "object database" in
the '80's. At most, it is another import/export format and a
performance/tuning issue.
Bob Foster
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