Return to the Press page

Interview: Kristen Carlson Accardi

LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 24, 2008

Tracing: no shortage of options

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 17, 2008

Printable page

Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ

MySQL moves forward (IT-Director)

[Posted May 7, 2003 by corbet]

This IT-Director article takes MySQL to task for not supporting XML. "The market works on the basis of perception and it listens to the stories that the 800lb gorillas tell. And the stories these vendors are telling is that you can implement XML in the database, that the overhead of mapping between XML structures and relational tables can be minimised if not totally reduced, and we have even got relational database vendors implementing hierarchical structures for XML indexing."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted May 7, 2003 13:45 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

And if the market worked on the basis of "the best tool for the job" it would ditch relational and switch to that 30-yr-old technology that's often called "post-relational".

As far as data is concerned, the underlying concepts between Pick and XML are near as dammit identical - give me an XML data record and I could transform it into a Pick record with almost no effort whatsoever. And ask me for Pick data in XML format and again - transform with no effort whatsoever.

While XML may be crap for data storage (too verbose, pain to search, etc etc), put XML into Pick and you've got 30 years worth of development that mnakes handling the data ABSOLUTELY TRIVIAL :-)

Cheers,
Wol

MySQL moves forward (IT-Director)

Posted May 7, 2003 14:58 UTC (Wed) by scotdb (guest, #3170) [Link]

Another "old" technology well suited to storing XML documents is IMS.

After all, XML is basically a hierarchical structure and IMS was (is) a hierarchical database.

IBM is still actively developing it but, unlike DB2, it has never really moved "of the mainframe". Wouldn't it be fun to have IMS on Linux ?

Does anyone remember how to code DL/1 calls ?

"Old" Phil Nelson
ScotDB Limited
(teamdba@scotdb.com)

MySQL moves forward (IT-Director)

Posted May 7, 2003 21:39 UTC (Wed) by dcoolidge (guest, #1390) [Link]

Does anyone remember Mumps?

MySQL moves forward (IT-Director)

Posted May 8, 2003 6:19 UTC (Thu) by ddostal (guest, #11053) [Link]

Surprisingly, mumps is still live and well. Our organization uses it with several other databases .... the [old-time] users love it. However, Delphi has been used to create GUIs for it in many cases.

MySQL moves forward (IT-Director)

Posted May 8, 2003 11:29 UTC (Thu) by ktm (guest, #11064) [Link]

"So, the jury is still out on the significance of MySQL."
What a load of tripe. PHB fodder. Hype-juice. XML in the
data model? Why not fairy dust?

Why is this kind of junk getting play on lwn?

MySQL moves forward (IT-Director)

Posted May 10, 2003 3:18 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Indeed.

XML is a language for creating languages for wrapping data to move it
around. It has nothing to do, and should have nothing to do, with the way
that data is stored after being processed at either end.

Why is it so hard for people to get that?

Or is there some Really Big Thing that I'm completely missing after 2
decades in computing?

Just these big DB companies feeling they have to be 100% Buzzword
Compliant, I guess...