Re: A good argument for XML

>An insight I have had lately is that the xml people are
>at heart document management people. By and large they
>don't have any history with data management.

>The nasty bit seems to come in to play because the xml people have
>somehow gotten it into their heads that data management and
>document management are really the same problem

Very interesting ideas. Really.

>I still don't see that xml has any least interesting thing to
>contribute to the field of data management.

My argument in favor of "XML" or rather hierarchical output, is not what xml/document management would contribute to data management, but the opposite. Everyday I deal with the need to create documents out of relational databases. I want to leave the data relational. But for document construction I have to somehow make a data structure that in many instances looks more like a hierarchy of data.

XQuery is an XML query language with XML output. And suggests the concept of a XML database. What I want is query syntax that will allow me to create Hierarchical data out ouf a relational database, and then this output could be made into XML. To me XML is to hierarchical data, what CSV (Comma Separated Values) could be to tabular data.

I know I can query the data and then let's say in VB or PL/SQL compose an XML document. But there ought to be a better solution than that.

Arturo Hernandez Received on Wed Jul 13 2005 - 17:20:11 CEST