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Where there's a canonical and frequently referred-to sequence or hierarchy to data, then fixing such relations in the physical representation of the data model has benefits. This is one area where I'm at a loss as to why our friend Fabian finds XML so abhorrent. On the one hand he chastises RDBMS folks for tying logical representation to a fixed physical representation, and thereby giving no relief to performance problems. Yet it seems XML addresses precisely the kinds of performance issues that RDBMS have with physically representing natural hierarchies and sequential relationships. Why can't XML be an optimized physical representation of some relational (logical) model? Yes, it will be slow for ad hoc queries, but it will be fast for natural hierarchies and sequences, which occur often enough in the real world to hard code them in a physical model.
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