RE: [xml-dev] XML-enabled databases, XQuery APIs

["scott wiseman" <scott@intercore.net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: David Lyon [mailto:david.lyon@computergrid.net] 
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 5:45 AM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] XML-enabled databases, XQuery APIs

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 4:50 pm, Ken North wrote:
> in an article by Edd Dumbill. Edd quoted Ron Bourret as mentioning 
> "Oracle 9i release 2 was the first out with "native"
> XML support, but their "native" XML support means storing the XML in a

> CLOB column [snip]".

I am a big fan of doing that..

> That requires clarification because there are some persistent 
> misconceptions about XML and databases.
>
> From the time people first started talking about "native XML 
> databases", there's been a myth that SQL databases cannot store and 
> index XML documents in their native format.

For business XML data exchange, I think that it is the perfect
combination.

And for mass interoperability, I would advocate an ultra-simple SQL
database structure (like the one I posted about a month ago on xml-dev)
that can be setup to send/receive xml documents. It should be able to
exist on all database vendors databases (ie be non-exclusive) and be
based on two accounting tables; traders(companies) and trader_documents.

The problem with file based XML systems is that it is awful to manage. 
Databases are so much cleaner to maintain. If the documents are filed
nicely inside memo/xml fields, well I think how easy is that.

Just need to have some nice open source communications software to do
the (what can be surprisingly) quite tricky job of transferring the xml
documents.

> Developers wanted more, of course, such as being able to describe 
> document structure and shred documents (map document content to 
> columns). That's also been available for years with SQL platforms such

> as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase and DB2 (XML Extender).

Even now I think are happy to have more. Anything that they can show to
the Boss and get approval for spending (wasting) time looking into :-) 

Open source is great for that.. I've come to discover..
 
> Even more desirable is implementing XML as an SQL type. This provides 
> efficiencies for the SQL engine and query optimizer. Informix was the 
> first to demonstrate that at XML conferences in 1999. Those demos 
> showed the XML type gave significantly better performance than XML 
> stored in a CLOB column. (IBM acquired Informix in 2001).

That's interesting, true.



David

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