size of XQuery developer community

[Martin Probst]

> But I also think, that relational format is much useful even today. We
> know, various reasons why relational model is beneficial (like high
> security, faster processing, transactional support etc).

While there is certainly a potential performance benefit in processing
fixed length records (relational) compared to arbitrary trees (XML),
exploiting this benefit leads to the schema evolution problems that
plague so many SQL users. I'm not sure whether the benefit is actually
worth the hassle of near-impossible to change schemata, there are
certainly many ares (e.g. document management) where the tradeoff
favors XML.

Security and transaction support are not really differentiators,
X-Hive/DB has had a full ACID transactional DOM implementation since
1999, including access rights and all. Other XML databases have
similar features.

For most document centric applications XML databases would be a huge
win. What's holding them back is IMHO lack of awareness and lack of
polished, complete development environments and toolsets; Documentum
DDS aims at this. And I'm still very sceptical about using XQuery as a
sole web development language, the approaches I've seen so far have
not been compelling at all.

Regards
Martin