Re: XML storing and management

On Sep 26, 5:16 am, karsoods53 <karsood..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> I get XML feeds as input and have to store this data on our server. I
> have worked with databases but new to XML. Can someone tell me how I
> can store and manage this data?

Depends on what you need to do with it. If all you want to do is store messages from the feed, you could just shove the XML into a LOB column along with other columns for the date/time received, etc. No different than if you were receiving, say, jpeg images.

A step up from that would be to extract relevant single-valued scalars as part of intake processing in your host programming language (e.g. Java) and stick them in querieable, indexable columns. For example if every XML message had exactly one <title> element in it, you could extract that as you were receiving a message from the feeds, then put it into a TITLE column as well as putting the message into a LOB column. Again no different than, say, extracting the horizontal and vertical resolution from a jpeg image and storing them in columns along with the jpeg itself.

If you need to be able to run queries over the contents of the XML, and especially if you want the query result sets to yield fragments of the XML messages instead of whole ones, you have a lot more work to do.

Databases such as Oracle's allow you to create XML typed columns which still store the XML in a LOB but let you dig out the content in queries, index it, etc. If you have XML schemas for your feeds, you could even go so far as to specify decompositions of the XML into relational tables. These databases also let you query by XML expressions, extract subsets of the XML, etc. Received on Fri Oct 05 2007 - 00:02:12 CEST