Home/ Questions/Q 80609
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-10T21:19:46+00:00

I understand that there’s no universal answer to the attribute vs. element debate (and

  • 0

I understand that there’s no universal answer to the attribute vs. element debate (and I read through the other questions I saw on this), but any insight into this particular circumstance would be greatly appreciated.

In our case we’re going to be receiving very large amounts of master and transactional data from a system of record to be merged into our own database (upwards of a gig, nightly). The information we receive is essentially a one-for-one with the records in our tables, so for example a list of customers would be (in our old version):

<Custs>   <Cust ID='101' LongName='Large customer' ShortName='LgCust' Loc='SE'/>   <Cust ID='102' LongName='Small customer' ShortName='SmCust' Loc='NE'/>   .... </Custs>

However we’ve been discussing the merits of moving to a structure that’s more element based, for example:

<Custs>   <Cust ID='101'>     <LongName>Large Customer</LongName>     <ShortName>LgCust</ShortName>     <Loc>SE</Loc>   </Cust>   <Cust ID='102'>     <LongName>Small Customer</LongName>     <ShortName>SmCust</ShortName>     <Loc>NE</Loc>   </Cust>   .... </Custs>

Because the files are so large I don’t think we’ll be using a DOM parser to try to load these into memory, nor do we have any need of locating particular items in the files. So my question is: in this case, is one form (elements or attributes) generally preferred over the other when you’ve got large amounts of data and performance demands to consider?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. If performance is the only requirement, I think you have to go with the attributes, just because it takes up less space. I don’t see any advantage to the elements.

    • 0