[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML Schema generation questions [was SQL schema to XML schema...]
Forgive me for responding without snipping the posting I'm replying to, but I'm unfortunately challenged with Lotus Notes, which does not allow inline quoting...so I must do it manually. <<<Therefore, it is natural - nearly mandatory - to represent a row as an element. >>> I suppose that if you wanted to represent the _schema_ of the database, it would indeed be mandatory. But if, rather, you were interested in the data for it's own sake, you may want to represent it differently. Relational databases are limited to data in two dimensions--rows and columns. They use the relationships between tables to get the extra-dimensional aspects that real data has. In my opinion, you shouldn't hamstring your XML into a two dimensional world. Of course, if your goal is to simply pack the data in a database into XML for transport, then this approach would work. But you need some more stuff for the metadata such as this column is a foreign key into that table. XML does provide a mechanism for that, but I've never used it. When I send data from the client to the server, because I've diagrammed the relationship physically in the XML, I don't need to relate groups of tags, like you would in the database. The object layer infers those relationships. I'm pretty much of the opinion that you should hide linking tables and other relational aspects of databases from the XML, unless there's a reason for it. <<<- If you plan to try the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Technology Preview, plan for attributes, because that's what you will get.>>> This was true for the early releases, but a demo of a new version that I recently saw allowed you to specify either elements or attributes. It also had a mechanism to specify a combination of the two, but that seemed too complex to me. However, it could be done, and I haven't spent any real time on it. I believe they were actually calling it the SQL Server 8 Beta or pre-release candidate or something, to differentiate it from the Tech Preview. The original tech preview also began to expose an API that you could call directly...but that approach has been postponed to my knowledge. They do have a thing called an "XML View" which looked very interesting. It was a way of exposing the data of your database without exposing the schema, and seemed very object oriented to me, at least in regards to the data representation. I'm otherwise pretty much in agreement with the rest--not that my opinion matters! ;^) Regards, Mike Sharp --------------------- Does killing time damage eternity? --KPIG tpassin@h... on 06/23/2000 06:35:11 PM To: xml-dev@x... cc: (bcc: Mike Sharp/Lante) Subject: Re: XML Schema generation questions [was SQL schema to XML schema...] Bob DeRemer asked about table schemas - >... I've generated "BizTalk" compatible schemas for each type (i.e. > element-based and attribute-based). I'm not sure yet, which approach is > best. > > Being fairly new to XML (i.e. 3 months), I'm curious if others have done > this before. If so, what they have learned along the way. My gut instinct > is to keep all columns as attributes, and each table is an element. > If you are concerned with relational database type tables, the fundamental organizing feature is the row. All queries return sets of rows, which in turn may contain subsets of all the columns. Joins produce sets of rows. Views produce sets of rows. Query conditions usually involve properties on a row-by-row basis. Therefore, it is natural - nearly mandatory - to represent a row as an element. This element would be inside another element representing the table itself. ... - If you plan to try the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Technology Preview, plan for attributes, because that's what you will get. - If you plan to apply namespaces to a field, make it an element. There is no ambiguity about whether the namespace applies as there can be for an attribute. Overall, I favor using elements. But there is no one answer. Cheers, Tom Passin *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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