Milan,

>> <long example - apology for noise, but I need to give real example />
>>
>> *THIS* is a small sample of a real schema - just covering the address!

M> [snip]

M> Hm, and those DBMSes that claim to "support the XML" have the ability
M> to give you such .xml file out-of-the-box ?

A complex schema shouldn't give much worries. It's just XML's way of
defining a structure - and it's verbose as anything else regarding
XML. ;-) An XML-enabled tool needs only to be able to output XML
according to a particular schema, then it can be transformed into
anything else by means of a - complex enough - XSL stylesheet.

M> I would really like to see how someone would extract xml from you
M> example with M$SQL or DB/2.

First you extract the data, then you transform it. My guess is that
Lester's difficulties stem from both the complexity of the target
schemas and the complexity in writing suitable XSL scripts - unless
he's trying to do everything in one step in, say, PHP, which would
produce code with the same level of complexity (or more) as the XSL
alternative, only perhaps more familiar. ;-)

I think that an XML-enabled database engine should be able to produce
XML according to whatever schema you throw at it, and run XSL
transformations on its own. But a tool outside of the engine would be
able to do the same as well. It would be good if FlameRobin would be
able to output XML; as you can imagine it's not a big deal...

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
http://www.flamerobin.org