Re: [xml-dev] Re: XML and the Relational Model

--- Frank <> wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 14:18, 
> wrote:

> 
> Oh and for what it's worth, I have plenty of
> anecdotal information that
> bibliographic metadata was a very hard problem for
> the relational model.
> It may have been solved in the last few years, but
> it was still a
> storage-eating performance killer ten years after
> the RM was the 'best
> practice' for 'widgets in warehouses.'

Is there any chance that someone could elaborate? 
I've heard that there are lots of these anecdotes, but
I don't know any details. 

Certainly a straightforward normalization of a serious
document-oriented schema such as DocBook would lead to
a nightmarish number of tables, but I'm not clear
offhand on why normalizing just the metadata would be
such a problem.