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Hi, all,
Jim Rankin wrote:
>
>
> On Jul 26, 2004, at 7:40 PM, Owen Walcher wrote:
>
> I am just saying, regardless of the schema of the XML (an industry
> standard
> interchange or internal structures) why not leave it in XML? Why always
> some other storage mechanism that either disassembles the XML or makes
> querying, updating and deleting in place nearly impossible?
>
> This is somewhat of a perma-thread on this list. XML is inherently
> hierarchical, so a "pure" XML database will probably be hierarchical, too.
>
> At one time hierarchical and relational databases were competing
> technologies, but overall the relational model, and relational
> databases, won out. The relational model is now more developed and
> generally accepted to be superior to the hierarchical model for most
> uses. (Please correct me if I'm wrong or oversimplifying here.)
>
> So the best way to frame your question is "Does a hierarchical model or
> a relational model best solve my business problem?" If the answer is
> hierarchical, it probably makes sense to always store your documents as
> XML and query/update/insert in-place. If the answer is relational, it
> may make more sense to store your data relationally and only
> consume/create XML at the system's boundaries.
If the business problem is a set of big documents containing a lot of
(common)structured data (somewhere in unstructured text) the use of a
good native XML database management system may be incomparable to any
other solution.
Issues like synchronization, access control, data locking and other are
best addressed in this manner I think. Any relational solution is either
inapplicable or unreasonable. Standalone xml files aren't good solution too.
--
Andrei Boyanov
CEO of Active Solutions Ltd.
http://activesolutions.bg; http://andrei.activesolutions.bg
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