The best thing about XML is that it is really is just a flat file
and everything in it has a beginning and an end. I cannot think of
anything that one would want to store in XML that cannot be stored
in a db and that also cannot be stored in a text file with way
less overhead. Examples are welcome.
You need to remember we're talking about XML databases that store
collections of XML documents, not simply a single XML document. A
single relational record can be easily stored in a tab-delimited
text file with way less overhead too. But when you have millions of
these things that you have to sort, search, update, backup, specify
access permissions, and so forth, then the database begins to show
its worth.
With that in mind, consider:
The Encyclopedia Britannica
The collected publications of O'Reilly Media
The complete work product of Skadden-Arps
The New York Times
The collected works of William Shakespeare and other Elizaebthan
dramatists
Then consider that you want to be able to make queries like, "Find
all the paragraphs containing both the words 'Bush' and
'incompetent'" so you can't just shove everything into a BLOB.
Not to mention that the utility of XML is not simply inherent in it's
being small. No one is claiming that it is small. But, there is
utility there that makes it worth the size. There is always a
tradeoff. To complain about XML because it takes more characters to
store data or lays it out in a manner that isn't the same old RDBM
isn't valid. I'd entertain it if I thought you wrote code in a
binary format the machine understands natively. I don't think you
do. All that wasted white-space... for shame.
*Grin* Seriously. With any abstraction comes overhead and a loss of
flexibility or power. XML doesn't do everything perfectly. But, it
fits a lot of things well-enough. *Shudder* I sound like an
engineer now rather than a mathematician. Yet, it is a valid
argument, I suppose. I've heard it enough times now to repeat it.
Jeremy
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