Re: native xml processing vs what Postgres and Oracle offer

paul c wrote:
> David BL wrote:
> ....

>>     3)  the tree structure can be defined but isn't necessarily
>> pertinent

Part of how it was explained to me many years ago: "start at the beginning, continue until you come to the end, and then stop".

In the early 1980's it became fashionable for consultants to add the word "normalized" to their CV's. Being as ignorant as anybody else in those days, I felt compelled to ask one of them what he was doing and why was it taking so long. All he could explain was that it was hard to get the tables right.

Later, some of the normalization theory became more widely known and the consulting industry which had previously touted a hodge-podge of methodologies jumped on the novel idea of trying to apply formal techniques to design.

But formal techniques are pointless without a formal starting point. It   took me some years to realize how much wheel spinning went on because people didn't bother to figure out the predicates they wanted in the first place. Those being crucial to decide on, because the human meaning is effectively dropped in the machine manifestation, abstract names being substituted in a regular form that is amenable to mechanical repetition.

The supposed application of XML today reminds me of all this - very precise syntax sitting on an amorphous hodge-podge of undefined informal concepts. Whatever meaning those concepts have is murky and jumbled, very little separation of concepts, more concerned with presentation than with any formal data organization. Received on Thu Nov 20 2008 - 16:04:10 CET