> Second, there were ideas that came out during Q & A that might be > expanded on to good purpose. Things that we might not know or take for > granted, like the philosophy regarding types and structures. The > audience seemed to be focusing on the need for structure, while the tool > did not seem to want to do that.
That made me wonder if most people completely missed the point. The application of XML databases is, I think, in situations where structure is either not applicable or not possible. Trying to stamp a structure on an XML database (from what I can gather) destroys one of the primary reasons for employing the technology. XML is flexible. That's what makes it different. If you shoehorn an XML database into what Rusty called a "rectangular" format, why not just continue using relational databases? As far as uses go, I was nodding the entire time that Rusty was talking about the usefulness of structure-free systems in the medical industry. I've worked in the medical industry almost exclusively for seven years and there have been several times that I have had to force data (documents, specifically) into relational formats that obviously didn't work well. As Rusty pointed out, it makes a developer feel dirty. I've seen "documents" tables with over two hundred columns, and it took all sorts of work-arounds to fix the performance problems that it caused. I've also seen the EAV format that Ali M. mentions in his email. None of these solutions seem to fit the problem very well. Rusty's presentation interested me because it seems to hold the best answer I've seen yet to the free-flowing/constantly-changing data that medical software has to deal with. I still don't feel that the (open source, anyway) XML databases are a *mature* solution, but they certainly hold a lot of promise for an industry afflicted with poor containers to hold our data. The hybrid solutions hold the most possibility, I think, because it meets the need for both structural and non-structural data. I will be watching the maturation of the available software with much more attention than I have before. - Brian Dailey realm3 web applications [realm3.com] freelance consulting, application development (423) 506-0349 _______________________________________________ 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
