[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Note from the Troll
Mike, Not just do those old hierarchical systems still own the largest share of data, most serious technical applications cannot use RDBMS systems for performance reason (read chip design, CAD, network management, etc). Not only that, there is a current move in OODBMS to support a better mapping between OO, SQL, and XML. If anyone's interested take a look at the Objectivity web site. (not a plug). I think the real issue becomes whether either hierarchical or relational storage/representation are sufficient for all applications on their own. And I think the answer is most obviously no. Martin Soukup Senior Designer Nortel Networks, Ottawa, Canada 10/27/2002 6:49:56 AM, tblanchard@m... wrote: I *can* understand why the snake oil, complexity, etc. drives people who have the XML hype shoved down their throats to live under bridges and yell at XML perpetrators who pass by :-) On the other hand ... >6) From the stand point of business process and enterprise architecture >- XML is an evolutionary step backwards. Hierarchical databases were >abandoned for relational models long ago Snake oil is snake oil, whether it comes from Mr. Ballmer selling us on XML or Mr. Ellison selling us on RDBMS. Don't confuse the loss of *mindhshare* by hierarchical DBMSs with "abandonment" in the real world. IMS, the meanest, ugliest of the 1960's hierarchical DBs is still used by 90% of the Fortune 500 to manage something like 15 million terabytes of the world's transactional data for 200 million users (including most of us, I suspect). http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/ims/v7/v7fact42.pdf > gave way to more centralized object model >architectures because centralization of business logic is more >manageable. Model View Controller architectures were created >explicitly to move the processing knowledge closer to the center. XML >"transformations" puts us right back into the same position we were in >when all the business rules were encoded in the UI and batch scripts. >It disperses knowledge without any underlying organizing principle >other than "a bunch of files". XML is getting the mindshare it does today -- and the snakeoil sellers are not being laughed out of town by the citizenry -- because the "centralization of business logic" and MVC architectures hit their scalability limits a few years ago. Once you have to deal with your supply chain in real time, your customers expect you to be available over the Web 24/7, and a lot of historically separate systems and organizations are forced to present a unified face to the outside, then a lot of the manageable, centralized business logic has to be abstracted away. I'd assert that XML is exciting because it allows a happy medium between centralized business logic and the "bunch of files" containing HTML, Javascript, Perl, etc. that were the initial attempt to leverage the Web's scalability to when the centralized model's scalability limits were hit. This doesn't mean that centralized object models and RDBMSs are "wrong" any more than "pre-relational" DBMS such as IMS and Adabas are wrong for the problems they have been solving effectively for decades. The hard core of XML (ignoring various abominations) is used to solve problems of integration and interoperability across time, space, and platforms that it is well suited for. The biggest challenge is to better understand what all these technologies are best for, how to use the best technology for the problem at hand rather than jumping from one snake oil salesman to another every 5-10 years, and to get all these things working together. Once the snake oil salesman have been run out of town, the "second system syndrome" efforts have been put out of their misery, and the points that David Megginson makes in http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200210/msg01518.html are widely appreciated, I think XML has a lot to offer in this synthesis. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
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