Re: Create a web interface to query a XML database

"adamretter: Listening to @michaelhkay speaking the gospel on XRX
Applications at #xmlss09 :-) Once you do XRX you never go back ;-)"

LAMP should be changed to XRX (names of programs -should- *must* be
changed to names of technologies)

new release of 1.4 eXist expected about 26 October

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Michael Schdfer
<michael.schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Manuel Souto Pico schrieb:
>>
>> I forgot to mention something which is important in taking a decision
>> as for what technology to use. With PHP-MySQL the user can send
>> queries to the database from a web form and get the results -- I
>> understood this can be done with XRX/XSLT/etc. However, with PHP-MySQL
>> I can also input data to the database and add new registers or
>> maintain the database updating the content of certain existing
>> registers, with phpmyadmin or with ad-hoc web forms. Can this be done
>> with the XML-based technologies?
>>
> We've been using variuos XML (Tamino, eXist, Sedna) and relational db
> systems
> (MySQL, Oracle) as a backend for a web app that receives and sends XML
> files.
> All of the mentioned XML db systems support XQuery, but implement it
> differently, since updates are not standardised in XQuery. There is a fair
> amount of similarity, but if you don't want to rely on a specific product
> it will probably cost you a lot of work to abstract away from the database.
>
> Our general experience is that queries can be very fast in all mentionend
> XML db systems. However, updates and large data volumes separate the wheat
> from
> the chaff. eXist's performance (last version we used was 1.2.1) degraded
> fast
> when the number of docs exceeded several thousands, so it seems it cannot
> handle
> large data volumes. On the other hand, eXist has very good standards
> support.
> Sedna was very fast with queries, even when we had over one million docs in
> the
> database, but updates to a single doc could take up to ten minutes then.
> Adding
> docs was still very fast. Only Tamino showed good performance with both
> queries
> and updates, regardless of the data volume.
>
> However, both MySQL and Oracle outperformed the XML db systems in every
> aspect
> and required far less disk space. And there are ORM frameworks like
> Hibernate
> that make it easy to switch between relational db sytems.
>
> BTW, clients interface withe the web app through web services, so no
> XSLT involved here.
>
> If you have further questions around our experience with XML db systems, I
> suggest you email directly to me, since this is certainly off-topic.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
>
> *  michael.schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxx    http://www.destatis.de
> *                                  http://www.statspez.de
> *-----------------------------------------------------------