Re: broad discussion about future market direction for DBA

From: Karsten Farrell <kfarrell_at_belgariad.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 00:46:31 GMT
Message-ID: <HXAC9.756$Dx5.76930442@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com>

grjohnson wrote:
> "Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_dial.pipex.com> wrote in message news:<3dd9194e$0$8512$cc9e4d1f_at_news.dial.pipex.com>...
>

>>I disagree (almost) entirely. XML is a self describing markup language.
>>Doesn't that just make your heart race. Actually even if it does, does it
>>make your CEO or marketing director's heart race. Thought not. It shouldn't.
>>XML doesn't *by itself* solve any business problem whatsoever.
>>
>>>--
>>

>
> Well, depends on where you look at it from. There seems to be a
> growing trend for companies to move away from the traditionaly
> relational model for storing data. XML helps this functionality. I.e
> storing data which changes from minute to minute, i.e. the TAGS of the
> record are added and/or removed without any modifications to the
> underlying table structure. It's not posible to store this type data
> in a traditional database WITHOUT DBA intevention, i.e. addition,
> removal of columns, and the less DBA intervention, the lower the
> cost... and lowering the cost does make the CEO's heart race.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Greg Johnson

I'm new to this area (isn't everyone?), so I might not have understood what I've read on the subject.

As I understand it, the XML is stored in a CLOB in the database, so the XML doesn't actually define a table or its columns, right?

Isn't XML strictly hierarchical? Hierarchical databases preceed relational databases (the last one I worked on was S2K on an Amdahl mainframe). The example (Native XML Storage in the Oracle9i XML DB) given at:

http://otn.oracle.com/tech/xml/content.html

is a Purchase Order, which certainly conforms to a hierarchical document structure. For things that fit nicely into a hierarchy, XML might do the trick.

I'm waiting to see if this "growing trend" is only in the eyes of the marketing folks ... or if companies really are moving in that direction. Larry Ellison has not been particularly psychic in predicting trends. Remember the network computer that didn't have a Microsoft product anywhere in sight (but which was almost as lame as a mainframe terminal)? In which warehouse are all of those things stored anyhow? Received on Tue Nov 19 2002 - 18:46:31 CST