Re: What is the logic of storing XML in a Database?

On Mar 27, 12:39 pm, "Daniel" <danielapar...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 27, 4:15 pm, "Marshall" <marshall.spi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:> On Mar 27, 11:45 am, Bob Badour <bbad...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

David Cressey wrote:

There are three things you can do with data: process it, store it, and
transport it. These three are all interrelated.

That seems so limiting like having an emotional vocabulary of happy, sad
and angry.

XML makes me sad and angry.

Well, there are different aspects to XML.

There really are people who think that XML databases are a good thing
because they allow you to put data into storage without having to
model the data, because "everybody" knows that modelling data is too
hard. Of course, there's that little matter of getting data out
again, but they have hopes that following conventions for positioning
some key tags will lead to a good result. These are the same people
who used to believe that storing name/value pairs in database tables
was a good thing. I can understand that that would make you
unhappy.

Exactly. I sometimes say:

Know schema, know semantics
No schema, no semantics


There's also the niggling detail that the standard XML query language
can return different results depending on whether or not it's a schema-
aware implementation, and I can understand that that would make you
unhappy.

But why would you be unhappy about XML as a transport format? It's
mostly an improvement over what we had before - CSV files, binary
formats, etc.

Geeze, I'm tempted to flame, but you asked so reasonably, I'd
be embarrassed if I did. (What is it about XML that drives so many
to extremes, either pro or anti?)

To answer:

I'm an engineer, and I have deeply held engineer values. I value
efficiency. I value simplicity. I value what Josh Bloch calls the
"power-to-weight ratio" of a design: how much can you express
vs. how much do you have to contend with to do it. Perhaps
most of all, I value elegance, which is in part all of the above
and in part an ineffable, aesthetic response.

XML embodies the opposite of all of these virtues.

It is wasteful and verbose. It is wildly complicated, and
worse, complicated in the face of a task that is fundamentally
simple. It is confusing: XPath, XQuery, XSLT, etc. There are
two different schema standard, DTD and XML-Schema. The
man with one schema standard knows how to structure
his data; the man with two knows nothing.


Marshall

PS. I had a math teacher once who said that a proof
was elegant if, when you read it, you wished
you had thought of it.

.

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