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My experience in this is still somewhat limited, however, I think that you will find
that, as a storage medium, XML seems to be more suited to archiving than regular
storage of data.
XML, to the best of my knowledge, is primarily stored in a pure text format. There
may be some initiatives to store it as binary, but I am currently unaware of them.
Of course, if you are able to convert the XML to binary and back again, ultimately
it doesn't really matter how you store it.
In any case, another of XML's strengths is the ability to separate the concepts of
data from markup/UI.
As a web-based application developer, this is one aspect that I find the most
interesting and exciting about it. I could potentially send data to my client one time,
and if my client wants to see it in a different view, I could simply send a different
stylesheet (which is likely to be cached on his/her machine), without requerying and
resending all the data. Then if the client wanted to see the same view (say he/she
is looking at a specially formatted report, for instance), but different data, this time
all I have to do is send the data, and I won't need to resend the stylesheet (XSLT),
since it is already on his or her machine. With thousands of transactions running per
day, this would result in massive time, processing and bandwidth savings for my app.
Also, in my experience, XML's real strength seems to lie in transferring data. XML,
particularly when associated with Web Services, allows data to be communicated back
and forth between diverse computer systems. This could be done with the data being
encrypted with SSL, and could be made to connect through a firewall, with some ease.
This could also mean quite a bit of savings for many companies. It can also mean
that these companies are able to keep software that is custom for them, that can still
easily interact with software that is custom for another company that they do business
with.
There are, of course, many different ways of doing these same things, however, XML
provides a fairly easy to learn, and structured way of doing this that is becoming
standard worldwide, and for what it does, it can be fairly efficient.
If you are looking to store data in XML for regular retrieval, this would be my
recommendation. Store the XML string in a memo or other large text type field in
the database table. In order to search on it, make sure that those fields which
would need to be searched have their own colums, or indexes in the database. In
most cases, I still wouldn't recommend doing this, as it is still likely to be
somewhat labor intensive, and repetitive (ie. inefficient), however, there might
be some situations in which it could actually save time and energy. Usually this
will be when a vast majority of the data does not need to be searched, and if you
are using this data regularly for transfer or web-display.
This is probably way more info than you wanted, but I've been pretty excited about
this for a while, so I get a little bit verbose sometimes.
Anyway, I hope this helps,
Chris Strolia-Davis
Database Specialist
Contractor - CDO Technologies Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Qiang Song [mailto:sq02@keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn]
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2003 7:49 AM
To: xml-dev
Subject: [xml-dev] raw storage about NXD
xml-dev:
I have explored NXD for several weeks.and used some industry products just
like Ipedo and Tamino,also apache open source Xindice.But till now I am
still not very clear about the raw storage form for XML
documents.is it in pure text format?If true,how to execute the query and
update operations.how to index for documents.if using DOM to build a tree
from pure-text XML document before executing query or update,then i think
it will be very low-efficiency.
Could anybody give me some directions?
Best regards
Qiang Song
Dept. of Computer Science, Tsinghua University
sq02@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
sq02@keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn
Blog:http://www.blogcn.com/blog?u=pavon
2003-12-23
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