RE: [xml-dev] Designing XML to Support Information Evolution

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

Hierarchical databases failed for a reason. Treating XML as a hierarchical data modelling mechanism especially in teh context of databases is inviting failure that anyone who's taken a database class in the past twenty years can warn you against. 
 
-- 
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM
There are always two solutions to the problem: yours and the boss's. 

________________________________

From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
Sent: Mon 5/17/2004 8:28 AM
To: xml-dev DEV'
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Designing XML to Support Information Evolution




On May 17, 2004, at 10:20 AM, Roger L. Costello wrote:

>  
> 1. How you structure your information in XML has a tremendous impact 
> on the processing of the information.
>  
> 2. Hierarchy makes processing information hard!  There exists a 
> relationship between hierarchy of information and the complexity of 
> code to process the information.  The relationship is roughly: the 
> greater the hierarchy, the greater the complexity of code to process 
> the information  (Some hierarchy is good, of course.  But the amount 
> of hierarchy that is good is probably much less than one might 
> imagine, certainly less than I thought, as described above.)
>  
> 3. Flat data is good data!  Flatten out the hierarchy of your data.  
> It makes the information flexible and easier to process.
>  
> 4. Order hurts!  Requiring a strict order of the information makes for 
> a brittle design.  It is only when I allowed the lots and pickers to 
> occur in any order that the flexibility and simplicity kicked in.
>  
> Comments?  /Roger

I'm wondering if you haven't rediscovered the relational model?  (Or at 
least you've discovered the importance of "normalization" in the 
relational sense even in the XML context).  But why bother with XML at 
all (except maybe as a data interchange format) here?  Wouldn't a 
relational reporting tool be much easier than XSLT with this data 
structure?

  C.J. Date gave a speech recently 
http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/originalContent/
0,289142,sid13_gci962948,00.html complaining that XML is trying to take 
over the world.  Maybe he has a point :-)  I certainly don't agree with 
all he's saying, but if you are modeling data rather than exchanging 
documents, I would think that the relational model would be the 
starting point until you run into its walls.

Clearly if flexibility is paramount, order and hierarchy are a pain, 
and there's not much gain *if* you have unique identies for everything 
and the identity is all you need to know to figure out what to do with 
the information.

  On the other hand, if *context* is important, i.e. the intepretation / 
semantics / meaning / processing paradigm of some bit of information 
depends more on where it stands in relation to other information, then 
order and hierarchy are critical.   That's where the XML "data model" 
(by which I mean "fairly deeply hierarchical labelled trees in which 
order is preserved", not the InfoSet per se) comes into its own.




-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>

The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php>