On April 16, 2003 08:16 am, Phil Shrimpton wrote:

> On Friday 04 April 2003 14:43, Paul Schmidt wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > how should, for example a stored procedure deal with XML?
>
> How ever it [the developer] wants, it all depends on what the document
> contains, and what you want to do with it. I can think of a number of ways
> of how I would use it, and they are bound to be different to other peoples,
> but as XML is a 'standard', it won't matter.
>
> > I
> > would think that for storing XML a BLOB or text field would be
> > sufficient,
>
> It is, and can be done now.
>
> > as for processing XML, that's different, the database is a data store,
> > XML is a data store,
>
> XML _can_ be a datastore, but I rarely use it for that
>
> > It would
> > make more sense for the client to explode the XML into separate database
> > columns and store those, as a table.
>
> It would, if all you wanted to do is store the data.

That's what Firebird does, it stores data. XML can be, and should be limited
to being either a source for data, or a destination for extracted data, in
other words your populating an XML document with database data. So the
question becomes should that be done within the engine, or within the client,
and is the benefit of doing it within the engine worth the cost of doing so.

Paul