Re: Please help me decide

George I. Develekos wrote:
> We're in the early designing stages for a knowledge management system
> that will model knowledge items as XML files containing text fields as
> well as BLOBs. The XML elements will be stored in a DBMS. Intelligent
> rule-based retrieval and management in general must be supported. The
> number of stored items will be in the thousands, but their size may be
> in the Megs. Access to the database will be through the WWW, most
> probably via JDBC, and will not be frequent. The OS will be WNT/2000 or
> Solaris.
>
> The million-dollar question now is: what DBMS should we go for?
> Relational, OO or OR? And in vendor-specific terms, Oracle? DB2?
> MS-SQL-Server?

George,

I don't quite understand what the XML is for, if you want to use JDBC. Maybe you can comment on that point.

Could you specify "Intelligent rule-based retrieval" more exactly? - Do you want to do wild things with your data that you can't specify today? That would sound like SQL to me, since the query capabilites of most object databases are limited.
- Do you have a clear and hierarchical object structure? Then you can solve most problems by navigating through the object graph. The direction would be OO.

OR ist the worst of both worlds, from my point of view: - There is no widely used standard to specify objects within SQL databases. - Experts that can handle vendor-specific extensions to SQL are rare.

My 2 cents.

Kind regards,
Carl

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Carl Rosenberger
db4o - database for objects - http://www.db4o.com