[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML versus Relational Database
I agree with everything in Soumitra Sengupta's posting. But let me add a more general "it depends". It depends, too, on whether you see your project as being the sole interested party in your data, now and in the future. If that's so, you need consider nothing beyond the technical and business criteria when deciding to go xml or not. But I'm interested in scholarly texts and lexicographical data about natural languages. With the first category, virtually everything points towards xml anyway. But lexicography is different. If authors of electronic dictionaries want tried and tested technologies that allow complex categorisation and retrieval of their specific data quckly and efficiently, at the moment they probably ought to go for RDMBS or OODMBS solutions (or proprietary sgml-based ones.) But if they do that, they are locking their data into a specific (tho' not necessarily proprietary) format with specific retrieval requirements. If instead they opt for XML, they leave it open to others easily to access their data and merge it into their different but related projects, even ones that haven't been thought of yet. Certainly in the field of scholarship, that hugely enabling potential of XML seems to me to outweigh any loss of immediate speed or efficiency that conventional database solutions might offer. Michael ------------------------------------------ Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/
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