[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Relational Tables and structured documents

• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan@t...>
• To: Peter Murray-Rust <peter@u...>
• Date: Sat, 21 Mar 1998 22:37:31 -0500

At 12:11 PM 3/19/98, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>I have been spending the last two weeks working on a molecular application
>which essentially consists of relational tables.  The application is
>largely hierarchical (a protein molecule) so that it benefits from being
>recast into structured document form. I have therefore found it useful to
>create routines which generate nodes in a tree as a result of joining tables.
>
>I expect this is a common operation (e.g. creation of orgCharts from
>relational tables).  XML would seem to provide a useful approach,
>especially client-side (most humans don't read relational tables very
>well).  Excuse my ignorance, but is this a sufficiently generic application
>that there are well-understood rules for it and is there scope for a
>generic XML approach?

This is rather analogous to the object-to-relational mapping problem. If
you define schemas in XML and define a mapping onto the relational
database, there is a solution. Or you can have someone define how the joins
should be made to create the XML elements. There is not, of course, a
general solution for looking at a relational database and making a sensible
set of "objects" out of it. There's been some research into inferring
structure from relational tables, but nothing that has been that good in
the general case.

Jonathan
 
jonathan@t...
Texcel Research
http://www.texcel.no

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i...
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Relational Tables and structured documents
    • From: Peter Murray-Rust <peter@u...>

• References:
  • Relational Tables and structured documents
    • From: Peter Murray-Rust <peter@u...>

• Prev by Date: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Proposed SAX Revisions
• Next by Date: Re: Relational Tables and structured documents
• Previous by thread: Relational Tables and structured documents
• Next by thread: Re: Relational Tables and structured documents
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread