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

[Jim Melton <jim.melton@acm.org>]

Mukul,

To nobody's surprise, I agree very strongly with your statements.

However, there are also very important environments in which there is 
very little or no relational data to be considered -- what I might 
call a "pure document" environment.  Such environments can be well 
supported by an implementation such as Oracle's or DB2's, but there 
can also be a case made for a "pure XML" database.

Trying to be balanced,
    Jim

At 10/19/2007 11:07 AM, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
>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
>
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========================================================================
Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL)     Phone: +1.801.942.0144
   Co-Chair, W3C XML Query WG; XQX (etc.) editor    Fax : +1.801.942.3345
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