Greg Stark wrote: > Personally I don't see any point in xml, but if there was a standard query > protocol then a client could send queries to any database that supported > it > without using any libraries. That might be useful. Of course you could do > that > without xml, but people seem to get more excited about complying with > standards when they invoke xml.
hm. I have to deal with xml quite frequently because I do a lot of DX with the gov't and other entities that are rapidly standardizing on xml. I like Oracle's approach to xml using object relational mappings to allow composition of documents server side based on natural data relationships. The XML document becomes something like a specialized view. It would save me tons of app-level coding if the server could do this for me. Since postgres is already fairly Oracle-ish in design, IMO this is definitely the way to go (XQuery = Insanity.). A FE/BE protocol revision would be useful but not necessary...the XML doc could be returned as a scalar. Right now I think all xml processing is done in app-level code, because the server (due to limitations of sql) is usually unable to return data the way you want it...so simply adding xml output from psql would be fairly useless for most real tasks (if it wasn't, someone would have done it a long time ago). Also, contrib\xml can already handle most of the simple things. Merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org