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Re: XML Database Decision Tree?

• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@s...>
• To: Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@r...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 11:00:06 -0400

At 04:36 PM 10/19/2001 -0700, Ronald Bourret wrote:
>Could you explain this further? The flexibility is easy to understand,
>but I'm having trouble seeing what it buys me. If I store my data 17
>different ways, I'm going to have one heck of a time querying it. This
>is the whole point of having a single schema.

For many applications you certainly *do* want to have a single schema. This 
schema can be either an XML or an RDBMS schema.

There are other applications where you simply want to capture the data, and 
you can not get all parties to agree on one way of representing everything 
before it is captured. Querying is more difficult, but it is a lot easier 
than querying data that has not been captured in a database because the 
database was too rigid. There is a LOT of data that is not kept in 
databases even though database functionality is desired. And there is also 
a lot of data that is kept in some foreign system, which can be exposed via 
an XML view that may not correspond to the schema we use for storing the 
same kind of data in our preferred schema.

And of course, if there is one schema that is the desired schema, it may 
also make sense to store the original data in the format it came in, but 
also to transform it into a representation in the desired schema. Having an 
authoritative source document is handy for reference, because that may be 
the format that the original customer or business partner understands.

I think it is desirable to be able to enforce a single XML schema, but this 
is not the only thing you might want to do.

Jonathan
Jonathan

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