Comments on: XML and Data http://dandube.com/blog/?p=332 Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:28:04 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Eric Likness http://dandube.com/blog/?p=332&cpage=1#comment-92 Eric Likness Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:56:12 +0000 http://dandube.com/blog/?p=332#comment-92 XML definitely held sway for a while until people started bumping into the extra characters problem. Some people advocated using Binary XML where all the UTF-8 and ASCII was just converted over into a binary format in order to traverse the Interwebs easily. In that case the issue was packet size and speed of transmission. But for databases, Hmmm. Good Question. The DTD for a given document is supposed to hold all the schema stuff that the Oracle 'external' file is supposed to keep records for. In that way it gets schmematized once, then all your XML is just data with each field relating back to th DTD hosted centrally at the WC3 or your own webserver. That way everything is uniform and consistent. Maybe what you need is an XSL Transform of what you get to map more easily into tables and rows. The real issue is Objects versus Table and Rows again. XML is more about objects, or flat files even whereas SQL is always tables and rows. XML definitely held sway for a while until people started bumping into the extra characters problem. Some people advocated using Binary XML where all the UTF-8 and ASCII was just converted over into a binary format in order to traverse the Interwebs easily. In that case the issue was packet size and speed of transmission. But for databases, Hmmm. Good Question. The DTD for a given document is supposed to hold all the schema stuff that the Oracle ‘external’ file is supposed to keep records for. In that way it gets schmematized once, then all your XML is just data with each field relating back to th DTD hosted centrally at the WC3 or your own webserver. That way everything is uniform and consistent.

Maybe what you need is an XSL Transform of what you get to map more easily into tables and rows. The real issue is Objects versus Table and Rows again. XML is more about objects, or flat files even whereas SQL is always tables and rows.

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