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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Opinions requested
At 02:17 PM 3/5/1999 +1100, Marcelo Cantos wrote:
>>"Jeffrey E. Sussna" wrote:
>>
>> There is not (AFAIK) yet any such thing as an XDBMS (though you could
consider
>>a file system of XML documements plus a web server to resolve URL's to
those
>>documents as such a thing).
>
>I am continually surprised to hear remarks such as this. SIM _is_ an XDBMS
>(it is also an SGML, MARC, RTF, etc. database with structure and full
content
>query capabilities).
I think one of the reasons you hear these kinds of remarks is that the
terminology
surrounding these systems is used differently by different folks. For
instance,
from what I know of SIM, I wouldn't call it a DBMS system of any kind, as I
don't believe (I could be wrong) it supports referential integrity
constraints, concurrency
control, recoverable transactions, and other features I would expect out of
a reasonable DBMS. Granted it has hooks that allow you to get it to work with
a DBMS that can provide all that, but that doesn't make SIM itself a DBMS.
I would instead class SIM as an information retrieval system, and a pretty
damned good one at that. However, SIM performs as well as it does in great
part because it's not doing the extra work that a DBMS should do, and which
add greatly to retrieval time from database systems (as well as limiting their
ability to handle complex data formats gracefully).
This isn't to knock SIM; anyone who needs a flexible information retrieval
system should be taking a very serious look at it. The Z39.50 support alone
puts it way ahead of the market as far as I'm concerned. But I don't think
SIM is evidence that there are DBMS systems that handle SGML/XML well; I don't
think they do. Oracle may very well be getting there with its latest release,
but I suspect there's still a lot of work to be done there.
Jerome McDonough -- jmcdonou@l... | (......)
Library Systems Office, 386 Doe, U.C. Berkeley | \ * * /
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000 (510) 642-5168 | \ <> /
"Well, it looks easy enough...." | \ -- / SGNORMPF!!!
-- From the Famous Last Words file | ||||
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