Re: Universal Astrological Database Format

> Whatever format you choose you need to start out by defining the
> structure of the metadata. The traditional tool for that is the Entity
> Relationship Diagram, usually abbreviated to ERD. To a first
> approximation an entity equates to a single table in a database.
>
> I think that's enough to get you started.

Allright, I’ve done a little homework and have a few questions.

1. Isn’t an xml database really a flat file?
2. If I add an entry to an XML file doesn’t it have to be ‘inserted’ in the proper section of the file? Is this insertion handled by the programmer or is there an ‘engine’ that handles reads and writes to the file? (Visual Basic uses the Jet DB engine). If the programmer has to handle writes then it seems the entire file has to be rewritten every time there is an update.
3. Are there ODBC dll’s to connect to an xml database?
4. Is there an XML editor (preferable free) out there to build tables and relationship connections?
5. Can you run SQL queries on an xml file?
6. Is XML really the best solution for designing an analytical relational database?

One thing I don’t like about the xml format is the fact that you can open it with a word processor. I’m planning this database file to be the storage format for a program I intend to write (it won’t be web based). It seems the text-based nature of xml makes it more ‘tinkerable’, easily corruptible by someone with good intentions. It also seems the data file would be much larger than necessary due to the formatting,
<FirstName>Fred</FirstName>. Twenty tree characters to store ‘Fred’. Or, <TimeZone>CST</TimeZone>, twenty characters to store ‘CST’. Received on Sat Jul 12 2003 - 23:27:32 CEST