At 03:24 AM 5/7/03 -0300, Fabricio Araujo wrote:

>A real nice use of XML is:
>1. A new format for external tables, since this feature is limited to
>fixed-length files. A lot of
>utilities can extract data to xml and would be nice to import these
>xmldocs directly to a table
>representation (and normalize it like a table).

That actually could be done now given an enterprising developer. The external
file API is (or at least was) designed as a formal interface to support
semantically
different file systems on different operating systems. The VMS version,
for example,
supported and optimized (if I remember correctly) again RMS ISAM files.

I don't believe there is a proper dynamic dispatch mechanism to support
multiple external file interfaces, an extension the external table DDL syntax,
and an extension to the system tables to track file type would be required.

But the larger problem is than an XML document is not a flat table of rows
and columns
but a complex hierarchy of named data. Any meaningful interpretation by the
server would need to be ruleset driven.

Jim Starkey