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On 4/15/05, Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@r...> wrote: > Ken North wrote: > > Developers wanted more, of course, such as being able to describe document > > structure and shred documents (map document content to columns). That's also > > been available for years with SQL platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, > > Oracle, Sybase and DB2 (XML Extender). > > Shredding is very useful for storing certain classes of data-centric > documents, especially when non-XML documents need to access that data. > In fact, I'd bet that shredding accounts for the vast majority of XML > use with relational databases. > > However, shredding shouldn't be viewed as a substitute for native XML > data storage as it doesn't preserve sibling order, comments, processing > instructions, etc. and usually doesn't support mixed content. It also > requires design-time mapping of the XML schema to the relational schema > -- something that won't work with schemaless documents. So it shouldn't > be viewed as a substitute for native XML storage but as a complementary > technology. I think you're over generalizing more than a bit. Over the years I've done a couple shredding implementations. In particular, I've previously built a generalized approach on top of SQL server that supported mixed content, sibling order and did not require a schema. Adding comments and PI's to that would have been pretty much trivial. There's nothing magic here; generalized hierarchical to relational mapping algorithms have been around for a long time... <snip/> -- Peter Hunsberger
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