[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML data bases, document management
>does anybody have practical experiences with XML data bases? like e.g. >poet, objectstore or tamino? what do you think about them? can you >recommend a product in this area? > >i want to setup a document management system based on such a data base, >therefore i'm interested in pointers to already existing applications. Here's two links you might be interested in: http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/DVS1/staff/bourret/xml/XMLAndDatabases.htm http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/DVS1/staff/bourret/xml/XMLDatabaseProds.htm The first is a paper I've written (XML and Databases) explaining the basic concepts behind using XML with databases. The second is a pretty comprehensive list of products for using XML with databases -- from middleware to XML databases to document management systems. If you're interested in writing a document management system, then you should look pretty closely at exactly how any of these products saves an XML document in a database. I'm not sure about the XML databases such as those you mention, but most of the middleware for working with XML and databases probably isn't adequate for your needs. This is because such products, as well as XML-enabled databases like Oracle and DB2, tend to concentrate on transferring the data (as opposed to document structure) from an XML document to the database and vice versa. In particular, you will probably want to preserve the following information in the database: Elements and attributes (obviously) Hierarchical structure (obviously) PCDATA in mixed content Order of sibling elements Order of values in multi-valued attributes Entity and character references CDATA usage Processing instructions DTDs etc. In addition, you will need the following capabilities: Bidirectional transfer The ability to model arbitrary (any) XML documents Update and delete of existing documents My guess is that these requirements are going to wipe most existing XML/database products off the list. In particular, most of the available middleware has very limited abilities to model arbitrary XML documents and I'm not aware of any that preserves physical structure, such as entity and CDATA usage. The XML-enabled databases (such as Oracle, DB2, etc.) generally do a better job of modeling arbitrary XML documents, although whether they can model *any* XML document is not clear to me. Similarly, I would be surprised if they stored physical structure information or could handle things like PIs and DTDs. Unfortunately, I don't know much about the so-called "native" XML databases like Tamino, but these might have a better chance of meeting your needs. Again, it depends on whether they are designed to handle data or document structure. My best guess is that you will want to use a persistent DOM implementation, such as that from GMD (http://xml.darmstadt.gmd.de/xql/index.html), or roll your own. -- Ron Bourret ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com *************************************************************************** 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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