[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML Database Decision Tree?
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 15:58:15 -0400 From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...> I may be digressing, but an implication of an XML DBMS support for efficient storage/retrieval of well-formed XML is that you can get many benefits of using a DBMS without going through the agonies of data modelling, database design, and performance tuning that RDBMS-based applications traditionally suffer. I don't think it's so much that XML means you don't need those agonies. Whether you need them really depends on the role that your DBMS plays on your organization. Having a strongly-enforced strict and structured schema has benefit and costs, which depend on the use case. That is, depending on what you're trying to do, the costs might outweight the benefits or vice versa. In the classic "database of record" "standard corporate database" use case, you've got a large corpus of critical long-lived corporate data, and there are lots of different applications that might read and write it (plus ad hoc queriers). To make sure that none of those applications breaks another by writing something into the database that another one can't read, you have to set up ground rules that all the applications must follow. The classic RDBMS schema is part of that set of ground rules, and there are these DBA guys who act as judges (or perhaps "as bouncers") in order to prevent car crashes. I think the need for these ground rules is pretty much independent of what data model the DBMS is using. (That is, if somehow someone ended up with a native XML database playing such a role -- even though I keep saying that I don't think that'll happen and that's not what native XML databse systems are intended for! -- then you'd still want a schema for the same reason.) In other use cases, rigid conformity may provide less benefit, and the ability to manage semi-structured data may be more pressing. For example, to again repeat the comments that you (Mike) made at the NEJUG talk in Burlington, if a purchase order for $1M comes in, you don't want to automatically turn it away just because it doesn't conform perfectly 100% to your pre-defined schema! Semi-structured data arises in more and more situations these days, including the integration of data from multiple disparate sources. (Anyone interested might want to do Web searches for papers about semi-structure data.) I think this is one of the areas of opportunity for native XML databases.
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