Re: What is the logic of storing XML in a Database?

On Mar 27, 4:15 pm, "Marshall" <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 27, 11:45 am, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> > David Cressey wrote:
>
> > > There are three things you can do with data: process it, store it, and
> > > transport it. These three are all interrelated.
>
> > That seems so limiting like having an emotional vocabulary of happy, sad
> > and angry.
>
> XML makes me sad and angry.
>
Well, there are different aspects to XML.

There really are people who think that XML databases are a good thing because they allow you to put data into storage without having to model the data, because "everybody" knows that modelling data is too hard. Of course, there's that little matter of getting data out again, but they have hopes that following conventions for positioning some key tags will lead to a good result. These are the same people who used to believe that storing name/value pairs in database tables was a good thing. I can understand that that would make you unhappy.

There's also the niggling detail that the standard XML query language can return different results depending on whether or not it's a schemaaware  implementation, and I can understand that that would make you unhappy.

But why would you be unhappy about XML as a transport format? It's mostly an improvement over what we had before - CSV files, binary formats, etc.

Regards,
Daniel Parker Received on Tue Mar 27 2007 - 22:39:57 CEST