Paulo Gaspar wrote:

> Martijn,
>
>
> You are missing the point. The issue is not storing but querying in an efficient way.

give one practical example

> Don't think about relational data. XML is used to store structured and semi-structured data of a different nature.

The same with relational databases , you can throw anything at it (a
whole filesistem for example, movies, ..etc)

>
> Think about XPath or XQuery and then imagine querying your database for documents or document fragments holding a given XPath pattern.

this looks like voodo , it looks like a tree database or graph and not
like relational algebra

>
> If you are still clueless, you can then try to follow the xml-dev list for a while to get a feeling for it... but it is so hard to get some usefull information from all the purely academic-but-useless crap that goes around there...

xml is good only for one thing : data exchange and even there is not so
good (compare it with csv, or database dump) this is why they want to
compress it or make it xml binary !

http://www.artima.com/intv/plain4.html
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/16/XML-Prog

And one more thing : xml sells because there is an X inside "xml" word
so it has better appeal for a buzzword than let's say sgml


--
Regards,

Marius - www.flamerobin.org