| I am not saying that we should just throw RDBMS away, but if the users
| or administrators, but having a single interface for managing both kind
| of information would be so much simpler !
| 
| From a user prospective, there is only one kind of information : a phone
| number is a phone number, the fact that it comes in a list or within a
| text doesn't make any difference. Couldn't we give the same coherent
| vision to DBA's or web designers ?

My comments have been referring exclusively the the internal *storage*
of the information. There is absolutely nothing preventing the
external view of all of these types of information to be a single
XML "experience" for the end-user.

| I can give a concrete example of what I'm currently implementing on one
| of our web sites.
| 
| We are selling to the shop owners of our district pages on a proximity
| site (see for instance http://dupleix.ducotede.com/dubois/).
| 
| In these pages, we are mixing information from a RDBMS (name, phone
| number, address, ...), free text and pictures.

Modern relational and object relational DB's make it easy to
aggregate files and media types (and spatial/geocoded data, etc)
so you really can mix and match. XML is a great external way
to render this blend of information taken from many sources.

| We want, of course the free text and the presentation to be very
| flexible.

Of course. Nothing stops you from storing "free-text" chunks in
external files if you don't ever need to query their contents. Storing
them in a Character LOB in a database means that you could search
them, too, in a way that a file sitting on a file system wouldn't
offer (beyond grep-type text searches).

| We have therefore stored the free text and layout in XML files and the
| other data in the RDBMS.

By putting it all in the the database, data, free-text chunks, layout
in XSL Stylesheets, you can manage it all in one place. Saving a document
to the database is just a matter of deciding how you want it internally
stored to most effectively meet your queryiability needs.

| Yes, except that managing hierarchical structures like those described
| by these RDF dumps may not be the greatest strength of my favorite
| relational db :)

I've found in the many internal websites I run (all
database wholly out of the database) that with
Foreign keys (and self-referential foreign keys) I can
store, query, and render pretty much any kind of tree
or graph I need, but this might boil down to which
SQL dialect you're using.

________________________________________________________
Steve Muench, BC4J Development Team & XML Evangelist
http://technet.oracle.com/tech/java
http://technet.oracle.com/tech/xml
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: XML Server <xml-server@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, October 25, 1999 12:19 AM
Subject: Re: OT: XML Server dream


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