Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Rys" <mrys@m...> To: "'Kay Michael'" <Michael.Kay@i...>; "'Dylan Walsh'" <Dylan.Walsh@K...>; <xml-dev@x...> Sent: Friday, May 12, 2000 1:37 PM Subject: RE: Storage of XML documents & Learning from history > > If you do need fine-grained storage, use an object database; relational > > storage of these structures will in general be grotesque. > > Here I disagree. [snip] > relational storage > may be as adequate. > > Shameless plug: > For a tool in a relational context to do both look at the OpenXML XML rowset > provider in SQLServer 2000 Well, since we're shamelessly plugging our own technologies ;~) I'd like to point out that a native XML database such as www.softwareag.com/tamino allows fine-grained storage without the tradeoffs mentioned in this thread. Since the XML maps directly onto hierarchical database structures, there's minimal decomposition/reassembly cost as their would be in normalizing the data into pure RDBMS structures. As I understand it, the performance advantages that are often observed for OODBMS (and hierarchical databases such as IMS and Adabas) in non-XML applications come from their ability to easily represent real-world data models without the need for decomposition on storage and JOINs on retrieval. The same pattern will surely hold for XML data. Likewise, with a native XML DB there's no loss of queryability (or need to define and extract queryable "metadata") as there would be in a BLOB or combined fine grain/coarse grain strategy. In evolving real-world applications, the "few pieces of information needed to do queries" may be difficult to define in advance, or may change as the application matures. In a native XML DB, all elements and attributes can be queryable without an excessive storage or processing overhead. Finally, a native XML database built on the underpinnings of a proven hierarchical database engine is likely to show more scalability, reliability, integrity over complex transactions, etc. than an OODBMS. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
|
