On April 4, 2003 02:55 pm, Doug Chamberlin wrote:

> At 4/4/2003 09:43 AM (Friday), Paul Schmidt wrote:
> >[snipped] I would
> >think that for storing XML a BLOB or text field would be sufficient, as
> > for processing XML, that's different, the database is a data store, XML
> > is a data store, so you could add a lot of complexity to the engine
> > trying to process what should be separate columns within an XML column.
>
> Sorry, but I don't think XML really is a data store, despite people's
> attempts to bend it into one. It is a data structure convention intended
> for the basis of exchanging data between systems.
>

It's still a datastore, albiet it should be a temporary one. Where I think
XML is important, is where you need to exchange information, where the format
is part of the data. For example I spent a year writing banking interfaces
for a payroll timeclock system. The fields could be any number and any
order, and sometimes the same organization had multiple formats for different
types of client. Sometimes they would want rate expressed as 9.50, other
times 950 and still other times 00095000 (how 6 banks and 2 payroll
companies came up with 32 different formats, is beyond me). Versus an XML
file, that you could determine the field and type from the file makes a lot
of sense.

That still leaves the question though, how is a database engine supposed to
deal with it? Where I see XML and a database coming together is through
something like a datapump, where the pump converts the XML into a record
ready for storing in a pre-defined database table as a set of fields. This
would be a client side type application though......

Paul S