Frankly, it sounds like this guy understands neither XML nor relational databases. XML is a general-purpose structured data format. The term "relational database" also connotes a way of storing data, but is usually used to refer more to the way the data is organized and efficient ways for accessing, transforming, and re-organizing that data. SQL, the standard interface to relational databases, is (and let's not debate the subtleties of this statement) a programming language for working with structured data. One aspect of SQL is that you can use it as a format for storing data in files, and in this respect I totally agree with your friend: XML is a better choice in the vast majority of cases. SQL is not designed for this purpose: it's like passing text around by storing it in string constants in C language header files. In fact, we largely have the SQL crowd to thank for XML- it was designed largely as a platform-independent way for databases to exchange data files with one another because there are a lot of problems with using SQL for this. As a result, it is *very* easy to write a bridge for just about any relational database which returns result sets as XML files instead of the traditional row/column format. Many (or most) databases support this "out of the box". Further, because XML is a format for storing structured data and databases (both relational and object-oriented) are focused on the storage and manipulation of data, you can write an interface that "looks like" a database as a method of accessing data in XML files. There are several systems and standards available for doing this to XML. Of course, while storing data in XML is very portable and readable, it is orders of magnitude less efficient in terms of both storage space and access time when compared with the internal formats of true database systems, so patching database interfaces onto XML files is a convenience, not a replacement for databases. If you really cared about efficiency, you'd just load the XML data into a database like mySQL and then access it in the database instead of emulating database functionality on the XML file itself. Finally, in addition to offering a structured data format, XML offers a unified syntax and approach to designing text-based cross-platform standards. Over the years a lot of text-based standards have been developed and it is from their mistakes in terms of awkward or non-standard syntax, portability, and industry adoption that XML has learned. As a result, many of these aging standards are being replaced with variants which are based on the XML syntax. SQL is no exception. Several query-processing XML languages are being developed and deployed, often designed as means of accessing other XML data-sources, but with possible long-term goals of replacing legacy data processing languages like SQL. Regardless of what comes of these languages, they fundamentally affect only the way you access data in a database; they do not change the nature of relational databases. As these languages gain acceptance, I see no substantial barrier to new query interfaces being added to mySQL- whether they come from the mySQL dev team or from other groups who simply write bridge code.
And anyone who tells you that any use of joins suggests poor database design clearly doesn't know *anything* about relational database design. On 9/3/02 at 9:21 am, Javier Gonzalo Gloria Medina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > hi everybody: > > i was talking with a developer and he told the next > thing: > > "if you have a database and you need to do joins to > make your quaries between tables... your database and > tables are not full functional, your tables were > created under a bad configuration" > > then he says. > > "the best databases are made with xml, old databases > like mysql, oracle and all the others, will not be > functionall thanks XML standar". > > Well, now I¥m cofused. > > Some one can help me with this "is that true", > > is XML the next generation of creating databases and > tables for beast results. > > THANKs > > JAVIER GLORIA > developer > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! > http://mail.yahoo.com/ > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Before posting, please check: > http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) > http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) > > To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
