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At 15:50 27/08/2006, Andrew S. Townley wrote: >Thanks for the discussion so far. Mostly just listening and trying to >absorb the collective experiences. One specific point below, however... <snip/> >Well, herein lies the crux of Mike's comments about if you don't start >with a DB that's likely what you'll end up building to some degree. If >I was managing "real" documents or providing more of a content >management system, this would more than likely work. However, I want to >be able to "slice and dice" my XML instances to provide different views >or ways of accessing the instances based on values of specific >attributes or elements. > >As I said originally, if I didn't care about wanting to keep the data in >XML as the "native" format of the system for easy editing by hand (in >particular for me, using vi on Linux) as well as providing more GUI >based view/edit capabilities via a Web-based interface (most probably >using XForms), I'd just forget about the XML aspect and it would be a >"traditional" RDBMS application. > >Based on all the comments thus far as well as reading some of the >articles/documentation on eXist, it would seem that an XML database is >really the only viable choice if I want to keep my data as XML and still >provide aggregated views across the instances based on values of >attributes (or other expressions using XPath and/or XQuery). > >If I went with the "traditional" RDBMS approach, I'd be spending most of >my application's CPU cycles going to and from XML, so the benefits of >being able to use SQL to pull the list of instances really doesn't seem >worth it. At the moment, I'm leaning towards trying eXist to see how >well it'll work for what I want to do. I have found Ron Bourret's pages: http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLAndDatabases.htm gives a complete introduction to the issues. It's very clear that you need to understand what you want to do and then find which approaches are best. Personally I am using semi-structured nearly-readonly documents with highly variable structure and wide vocabulary and eXist addresses this well. http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLDatabaseProds.htm gives a very comprehensive list of products (well over 100). >Again, thanks for all the discussion so far. There's likely to be some >additional comments during the week, so my decision's far from set in >stone yet. I hope so - this is what XML-DEV is for... and I'm not clear there is an alternative place to ask these questions. P. Peter Murray-Rust Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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