size of XQuery developer community

[Mukul Gandhi]

Hi Martin,
   Thanks for sharing this study. I won't comment on siding with
particular vendors :) Though, I would like to further say a bit,
generally about data management for software applications.

I have felt, and also think that even today, data modelers like
keeping an enterprise data in Relational storage.

I think, XML started to be used as a format, for specific areas like
configuration files, web service messages and so on. But today,
enterprise data modelers are trying to use XML as well, to represent
core business entities (for reasons, as we discussed, like schema
volatility etc).

XML certainly is a great format, and has uses in numerous
applications. We all want to keep lot of data in XML form. Having said
this, I don't think, that from an enterprise data architecture point
of view, it's good to keep all enterprise data as XML. We need to have
a hybrid relational, and XML storage. Relational DB users, had a pain
long time ago (a few years back, I guess, when hybrid relational/XML
DBs didn't exist), about how to store XML data in relational DBs. In
earlier days, approaches like shredding XML data into relational
tables were used. But this approach required extra effort in designing
suitable relational schemas, for XML data. I think, with the
introduction of XML type in relational DBs, and it's management with
hybrid SQL/XQuery engines has brought tremendous relief to data
modelers, and application architects, who can now much easily store,
and access XML data in a relational DB. No design time thinking is
needed now, by data modelers, about how they should store XML data in
relational DBs. This design is now provided by the DB vendors (like
the XML column, and hybrid SQL/XQuery processing) which is, or will
become fairly standard in the near future. The integration of
relational/XML data by these newer databases, has led to faster data
designs, and also good data designs.

But I do feel, that XML only databases are useful in certain areas,
where we wish to keep all application data as XML. But to my opinion,
XML only storage is not universal. Relational plus XML storage is near
to universal, than XML only storage.

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 8:36 PM, Martin Probst<http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk> wrote:
> It might just be me, but looking at SQL/XML makes my eyes bleed.
> Beyond that, the relational databases do support XML and XQuery
> somehow, but XML standards beyond that are virtually nonexistant.
> Shameless plug, but maybe still interesting to some:
>
> https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-2999
>
> Regards,
> Martin


-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi