Re: why hierarchy?

Reminder: XML is intended as an interchange syntax, and therefore was designed for maximum simplicity. By all means, if you want to manipulate the data, you should load it from the XML into whatever representation makes most sense -- which may be relational rather than hierarchical, or may be some other approach entirely, depending on the needs of the application. Don't confuse syntax, semantics, and implementation.

On the other hand, IBM's new XML support in DB2 demonstrates that a direct representation of the XML infoset can indeed deliver good performance, if you're careful about coding it.

(I'm pointing this back to comp.databases.theory, since arguments about syntaxes other than XML really aren't relevant to comp.text.xml, and since you *can* represent relational data in XML if you want to do so.) Received on Wed Jul 26 2006 - 17:25:58 CEST