Re: [xml-dev] XQuery & Several records (instead of one xml-field)

["Mukul Gandhi" <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>]

Hi Mike,

On 10/19/07, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
> My experience so far of these hybrid relational/xml systems is that your
> problem as a user is not a lack of functionality, but an excess. There are
> simply too many ways of doing the same thing, and they have too many
> irritating differences - different sets of functions, different rules for
> case independence, different conventions for escaping special characters -
> and different (unpredictably different) performance. I find it hard to
> believe that this ugly hybrid of SQL and XQuery represents the future of
> database technology. I find databases where everything is XML (or indeed
> where everything is tables) much easier to work with.

I have slight disagreement with your views.

I think unifying relational data and XML is a good move. Imagine that
an organization has data in RDBMS, as well in the XML form. That
organization needs to produce something (for e.g. reports of some
kind, or say an application) by unifying information from the
relational and XML world. Then we need to join data stored in the
RDBMS and XML. If we don't have a unified relational/XML store, I
think, it'll be slightly difficult to join data from the two worlds
(although not difficult for good application programmers).

While designing a logical/physical data model of an application, we
can decide to store everything in a hybrid relational/XML database. I
think this is a good strategy.

-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi