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Going Native: Making the Case for XML Databases (O'Reilly)

[Posted April 13, 2005 by cook]

Ronald Bourret promotes XML Databases on O'Reilly. "So what are the use cases for native XML databases? As John Merrells, one of the developers of Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB XML, waggishly put it, there is only one use case, and that is simply, "Got XML?" In other words, if you have more than a handful of XML documents that you need to store, you should store them in a native XML database. The reasons are the same as for storing data in any other database; ease of management, enhanced query performance, concurrent access, transactional safety, security, and so on."

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Posted Apr 21, 2005 11:34 UTC (Thu) by leandro (subscriber, #1460) [Link]

So they want us to use a half-baked not-quite-a-data-model to store one specific data structure differently from everything else...instead of just using a general, theoretically sound relational DBMS.

No wonder IMS/DB, IDMS, dBase, Pick, OODBMS are all going the way of the dodo. Theoretically sound systems (like Lisp) tend to stay around when ad hoc solutions prove their own limitations.