Within a very short amount of time XML has become an essential part of almost every developer's arsenal of tools. It has affected every area of software. One of the fields where the impact of XML is still being worked out is in the world of databases and data management. Will XML and native XML databases replace traditional relational databases? How can XML be used as a tool to make relational databases even stronger? This book is intended to address these questions. It provides a discusssion of the various XML data management approaches employed in a range of products and applications. The book is based on a series of presentations at last year's OOPSLA conference. Topics covered range from using XML with Oracle9i or SQL Server to embedded XML databases to Tamino. Individual chapters are written by experts in those fields. In all cases the authors use concrete, practical examples, explore alternative approaches, and examine their strengths and weaknesses. There is no other book with the breadth of coverage offered here.
Publisher:
Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors:
Akmal B. Chaudhri, Awais Rashid, Roberto Zicari
Release Date: 2003-03-22
ISBN/EAN: 0201844524 / 9780201844528
New Price: $24.27 /
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Average Rating: 5.0
Number of
Reviews: 2
Well overview of available products and strategies
Rating:
I think it is a very good book. It describes several actors in the XML data storage world. It also points out several strategies to deal with XML in relational databases. It is very easy to read and the language is very clear. Some experience in XML and how to store it is recommended in order to get the most of it. I really enjoyed the chapter on eXist as it really goes into details about the index and storage architecture. It is stays quite high level though. It helps you understand pros and cons of the different products and architectures (client/server as opposed to embedded). Everyone dealing with XML storage should read it.
Total Votes: 1, Helpful Votes: 1, Date: 2004-11-14
Precisely what we needed
Rating:
At our company, we write Java applications. Soon, we got to the point that we needed a more formal way to read/write data than merely an ad hoc approach. We use XML. The obvious approach is to use a well tested relational database, like those supplied by IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. A problem was getting detailed, objective explanations of what would be involved with each choice. Each vendor is perfectly willing to be our "friend" and supply us with reams of documentation. But still...
The chapters in this book that describe how to hook up XML to those 3 vendors' databases were excellent and clear.
But what we ended up doing was going with something suggested in ANOTHER chapter - building an embedded XML database. You will not see this advocated by a vendor; there is no sale for them here. Other than this book, we found it tough to get lucid explanations of the pros and cons of this route. It will take more work, but we hope it will give better performance - no interprocess communication, for one thing. Plus of course no licence fees, and easier installation and management, since we will have access/own all the source code. This was not our original intention, by any means. But the book's comparative analysis was so persuasive that we ended up taking this road. (Hopefully, it will not be a dead end.)
That one chapter on embedded XML databases was, to us, the most precious thing in the entire book!
Total Votes: 25, Helpful Votes: 24, Date: 2003-05-01
