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Hi, all, Jim Rankin wrote: > > > On Jul 26, 2004, at 7:40 PM, Owen Walcher wrote: > > I am just saying, regardless of the schema of the XML (an industry > standard > interchange or internal structures) why not leave it in XML? Why always > some other storage mechanism that either disassembles the XML or makes > querying, updating and deleting in place nearly impossible? > > This is somewhat of a perma-thread on this list. XML is inherently > hierarchical, so a "pure" XML database will probably be hierarchical, too. > > At one time hierarchical and relational databases were competing > technologies, but overall the relational model, and relational > databases, won out. The relational model is now more developed and > generally accepted to be superior to the hierarchical model for most > uses. (Please correct me if I'm wrong or oversimplifying here.) > > So the best way to frame your question is "Does a hierarchical model or > a relational model best solve my business problem?" If the answer is > hierarchical, it probably makes sense to always store your documents as > XML and query/update/insert in-place. If the answer is relational, it > may make more sense to store your data relationally and only > consume/create XML at the system's boundaries. If the business problem is a set of big documents containing a lot of (common)structured data (somewhere in unstructured text) the use of a good native XML database management system may be incomparable to any other solution. Issues like synchronization, access control, data locking and other are best addressed in this manner I think. Any relational solution is either inapplicable or unreasonable. Standalone xml files aren't good solution too. -- Andrei Boyanov CEO of Active Solutions Ltd. http://activesolutions.bg; http://andrei.activesolutions.bg
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