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

RE: XML Repositories

• From: Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@i...>
• To: "'ROB.S.HINES@n...'" <ROB.S.HINES@n...>, xml-dev@i...
• Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 12:32:17 +0100

>         Being a newbie to the group I have what I consider a 
> burning question, but has probably already been hashed out. If someone
would 
> point me in the right direction I would be quite appreciative. Basically I
need to 
> make some decisions regarding my position on Repositories for XML data, 
> specifically Computer Based Training developed in XML. There will be
thousands of courses 
> residing in the repository, served up world wide.
>         My initial position was to go with an Object Database, in
particular
> something built around a solution like POETS Content Management System.
However,
> there have been many individuals that dislike this idea, and balk at the
idea of
> leaving the safety of the well know RDBMS community.

We've made this journey and learnt quite a few lessons from it.

We were using an object database (an early version of Jasmine), but after a
couple of years we reverted to relational databases. The reasons:

- people were storing data in very fine-grained form and it took ages to
reassemble for display. It's better to store the data relatively
coarse-grained and split it up (by parsing) when you need to.

- we hit a skills bottleneck, there were only a few gurus who understood the
technology

- the class library was getting ridiculously complex, we weren't achieving
enough re-use across different projects to justify the generality of the
infrastructure

- we hit immaturity problems with the technology (e.g. lack of low-level
performance monitoring and tuning tools) - the kind of boring things where
20-year-old products like ORACLE really score.

Regards,

Mike Kay

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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
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:
  • DTD's in external Entities?
    • From: Binesh Bannerjee <binesh@h...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Special characters in Attributes
• Next by Date: DTD's in external Entities?
• Previous by thread: Re: XML Repositories
• Next by thread: DTD's in external Entities?
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread