I am working on an application that has object data mapped to tables.
The mapping was done many years ago, before the likes of Hibernate came
along. It basically maps a class to a table. Object properties with
multiple values get their own tables. There are other interesting
mappings, but that's the overall concept.

We have a guy that has been doing research on an alternate approach.
He's storing the object data in an XML string. The XML string is stored
in the only field of a table. The table is the only one in the system.
He's reporting huge performance increases with this approach.

Have any of you heard of anything like this? What do you see are the
pros and cons of such an approach?

Steve Miller
Language Software Development
SIL International