On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 05:19, Lester Caine wrote:

> Dave Benjamin wrote:
>
> > I'd expect the engine to do at least the following:
> >
> > - Ensure syntactical correctness
> > - Validate against an XML Schema or DTD
> > - Perform queries on subelements
> > - Perform modifications to the document model
>
> Basically - replace SQL with XML ?
>
> Personally I'd like to see how a large database such as the UK NI
> database could be 'stored' as XML. As far as I can see there has to be
> some mapping between the 'dump' of the entire database as an XML file,
> and a more compact and usable internal representation. I have the
> current XML Schemas, but they leave as many holes as plugs, and just
> define several possible ways of including all the same simple data ;)
>
> I'm slowly getting my head around the XML 'datatypes' and building a
> mapping I can work with, but I still haven't 'seen the light' on how
> this INTENDED to work practically.

I think that a lot of the XML advantages that some DB vendors are
touting are more marketing male bovine manure, then actual advances in
database technology. XML is best, when, multiple software systems need
to exchange data, or have data exchangeable between them, where the
sender and receiver don't have a tight binding between them. The DTD
being the glue between them.

One of the things I always find funny in computers, is everything must
be the Swiss Army Knife of technology, rather then just letting a tool
have a specific task that it's really, really good at, and use something
else for other tasks.

Paul