How many of you are actually using pure XML databases over RDBMs? The former seem to be gaining momentum, but I don’t understand the advantage. Anyone cares to explain?
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How many of you are actually using pure XML databases over RDBMs? The former seem to be gaining momentum, but I don’t understand the advantage. Anyone cares to explain?
Conditions that suggest XML isn’t a crazy idea
If your data looks like a collection of documents. For example, novels have structure, e.g. chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words. You might want to access the structure programatically, but it would be hard to make a relational schema that would support that.
A mind boggling number of fields and tables required, almost all are optional. For example, not all novels have a villain, but a villain attribute or tag would be easy enough to add to an xml document.
If you have a fairly small amount of data.
Data is strongly hierarchical. It is easier to query an XML document of a organizational chart than to do the similar query on an employee table with a manager column that links to itself.
Example- DasBlog which uses plain ole xml as the datastore.
Conditions that suggest a relational model is better
Most of your data fits nicely into tables and columns, fairly small numbers of fields, most fields are required.
There is a lot of data. The Relational world has been optimizing for performance much longer than the XML database world.
You can have it both ways