David Krings wrote:
Don't worry! Finally someone who sees XML as what it is and that it is by far not as glorious and the key to world peace as many claim. In the end XML is an ini file on steroids. And XML without DTD is only half of the pie....so much for self-defining.
If all you do is INI files, then all you'll use XML for is INI files. Some of us do a little more than that though.
Roughly 80% of the world's data cannot plausibly be stored in a relational database. The 20% that does fit there is important enough that we've spent the last 20 years stuffing it into relational databases and doing interesting things with it. I'm still doing a lot of that.
But there's a lot more data out there that doesn't look like tables than does. Much of this data fits very nicely in a native XML database like Mark Logic or eXist. There's also data that has some tabular parts and some non-tabular parts. This may work well in a hybrid XML-relational database like DB2 9.
If your only place to put pegs is a table with square holes, then you're going to try pound every peg you find into a square hole. However, some of us have noticed that a lot of the pegs we encounter aren't shaped like squares, and sometimes we need to buy a different table with different shaped holes. :-)
Relational databases didn't take the world by storm overnight. XML databases won't either. But they will be adopted because they do let people solve problems they have today that they cannot solve with any other tools.
-- Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED] Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/ _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
