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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T21:23:28+00:00

I’ve seen a few relational databases where the XML directly mirrors the SQL, and

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I’ve seen a few relational databases where the XML directly mirrors the SQL, and I was wondering if anyone could give me some insight as to why people use XML over other options. I was under the impression that it was more a personal preference, but I was told by a classmate that XML is considered “better” ie more efficient in certain cases. So I wanted to pose the question to you folks, because frankly I wanted a second opinion.

The question: When would you use XML instead of ColdFusion or PHP (or other alternatives)? What are some inherent advantages that would make it a more desirable option?

For example, this is what the XML might look like:

<data>
<dataObject name="Test">
    <primaryKey>Num</primaryKey>
    <foreignKey dataObject="Test" key="Num"/>
    <datums>
        <datum type="integer" key="itemRecnum" label="Item Recnum" data="required"/>
        <datum type="string" key="status" label="Status" data="required"/>
        <datum type="integer" key="idnumber" label="ID Number" data="required"/>
    </datums>
    <constraints/>
</dataObject>
</data>

So in the SQL server, each of these have a 1-1 correspondence, with each datum type being a column.

Can someone please explain what the advantages of using XML to pull from the database are? What exactly is happening here and why is it used over CF or PHP? And how is it pushing and pulling from the database?

What if you were to mix the two? Perhaps one would use coldfusion for inserts, and xml just for views?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The intent of XML is to store data in a flat file,
    humanly readable (XML has a huge overhead in the textual naming of the entities. Also it is not meant to be human readable, it is a transport medium), easily accessible form. Methods for accessing an XML
    data “store” are quite robust and evolving all the time, to include a
    proposal from Microsoft for “XQL” – an SQL equivalent designed to
    manipulate XML data stores.
    XML is so simple that it can itself be used as a database – a very flexible one, indeed: your XML implementation can be infinitely customized through tags and a different array of libraries. As a plus, should your database get corrupted, you can open it in virtually any text editor – it’s a text file, after all. However, XML has a major drawback: it is slower than SQL when processing data, and requires more resources to run.

    About ColdFusion & XML you can read HERE

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