Re: A good argument for XML

arthernan_at_hotmail.com wrote:
> >> event
> >> participant
> >> agenda
> >> survey_headings
> >> ce_data
> >> faculty
> >> participant
> >
> >So you have several tables, and the join graph is a tree? Nothing
> >special here.
>
> I don't think you are giving me the benefit of the doubt. I'll be more
> specific. An event in our database is a class held in a hotel or like.
> Each participant gets a packet with several pages which include an
> agenda, a participant list, faculty, CE forms, a survey form and this
> is probably just a third of the current contents of the report.

Does every participant gets identical package or not? As they participate in the same event I assume they do.

> Now how many roundtrips? We have classes of 300 people so you do the
> math.
>
> Now let me save some time here. Someone could say aha!! you are talking
> about separate reports. Well this report is made into a single
> postscript file one class at a time. And then it's sent to be printed
> by a third party.
>
> >going to digest all this information in a second. The latency of user
> >processing your report indicates that, perhaps, he can afford waiting a
> >minute or two while the report is generating.
>
> You are correct; the user can wait on this one. And for the size of the
> report 5 to 20 minutes is't actually pretty impressive. But maintaining
> these kinds of reports is a nightmare. All the queries are separated
> from each other. And fields that were already queried at the top level
> "have" to be queried again. I wander if the self imposed tabular output
> restriction is preventing the report from running in less than a
> minute.
>
> Any report can be made from tabular results, that is how most people
> traditionally do them. Tools have been developed so a simple two level
> hierarchy is easy to handle. Even this complex report is working with
> tabular input. The finished content in this case is clearly
> hierarchical, and it is in a substantial amount of cases.

I still fail to understand why the output is hierarchical. One way to improve communication is to express your example formally in SQL. About 1 page, no more, although you can indicate places where the scale goes up.

Then, we have a discussion. Received on Fri Jul 15 2005 - 12:08:22 CDT