[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML versus Relational Database
So what you are saying is, might be done but may not be worth the cost of doing it that way? I agree. I've read elsewhere from reasonable folks that DAD suffers at the hands of MOM. I'm not convinced that some of the promises made for XML were realistic in terms of open generality. Perhaps some drill down into your requirements may be useful to the thread although I may be able to guess some of them. <rant>Many lessons of SGML applications were lost along the way. Early works on squashing SGML docs into relational dbs were not totally successful. It was like taking a dress catalog, slicing it into uneven sizes, putting these into a blender, then trying to find the price of blue bits in the goo. IOW, the navigation was terrible and dimensions of addressing had to be handled with meta tables. Awkward.</rant> The solution was advanced contentindexing that enabled one to JIT rebuild the catalog using the content relationships (thus the car analogy) and it only worked well if the cross-reference indexes were 'native' for example, reference designator systems in mil manuals. Imposing these externally or at run time made the interface foreign. We had to design them into the database almost as business objects. On the other hand, the total object systems suffered because the meta-property sets were not layered cleanly. Thus, groves. If I am gleaning anything from the experience with the application language I mentioned in the earlier email, it is that the property set (a la groves) is about as good as it gets when one uses data declarations to support interoperable objects via shared standards. The object model itself, realized as an API, isn't enough. The cost of using the meta-API is performance. So binding directly to an object model based on the named properties of the content becomes the alternative. The tradeoff is flexibility. From DOM to Applet and back again. No free ride; no size fits all. Ok. I retract what I said. It isn't trivial if you account for efficiency and clarity of application. It is a PIA to map a document to a relational database. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Linda Grimaldi [mailto:grimlinda@e...] I guess my concerns are somewhat different. What I want is a repository that does not constrain my XML data and still gives me full access to all of it in a meaningful fashion. I'm kind of fed up with reading about "data centric" vs "document centric" XML. I thought part of the promise of XML was that I would eventually be able to handle documents as data and vice versa- the distinction would be moot. I want to design XML that works for my application, without having to worry about making it fit into a relational database.
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