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RE: are native XML databases needed?

• To: 'Ken North' <kennorth@s...>, XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: are native XML databases needed?
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:41:53 -0500

Thanks much for the reference to Schouten's work.  We'd 
done this sort of thing for CASS at that time, but did 
not store the SGML structure in the relational db. 
We queried it into templates using the nascent Mentor 
Context system.  The Lockheed system was more advanced 
than that, but I don't know if they were aware of 
Schouten's work.  I would hazard a guess that there 
are earlier versions of the approach possibly using 
IBM GML or Scribe.   The books on Document Databases 
that I was first aware of appeared earlier than 
that.  

The sea change for me was the desktop machines such 
as the Apollo series that enabled us to work easily 
in the networked environment with such things as 
scripting facililities that could walk the network 
nodes to harvest data from each writer's station. 
Saved a lot of time and lost a lot of editors and 
data entry personnel.  It was an easy conceptual 
jump to the Internet but we thrashed on the 
addressing model.  HTTP blew that fog away.

len


From: Ken North [mailto:kennorth@s...]

Len Bullard wrote:
> Lockheed Martin (texas) did it for IETMs using SGML.
>
>  All done before the web was  a gleam.

Similarities with storing SGML and what's done today with XML:

1. Decomposition (shredding)
2 Store the entire document
  - Store information about document structure in a database
  - Store document content in the database, or store externally with
pointers in
the database
  - If the former, provide full text searches
  - Index on tagged fields

Giving due credit to innovation: Hans Schouten developed a conceptual model
for
storing SGML documents in Oracle databases:
"SGML*CASE The Storage of Documents in Databases" (1989).

Schouten took the approach of storing the document's generic logical
structure
(based on DTDs).

Does anyone still have the SGML Users' Group Bulletin (vol 4, number 1)?

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