Every so often you come across people desiring intense XML and RDBMS interaction. Recently, here: Technical Notes and Articles of Interest » MySQL 5.1 is gaining some momentum.
In MySQL land, this usually means “An XML Storage Engine would be great”. hrmm… a storage engine is a way to store a table. A table is a relational thingy. Surely what’s wanted is a good way to query an XML document and search for a specific XML document.
So, is what’s really wanted good XML indexers and the ability to extract parts (or the whole) of a document? Maybe there’s some extension to fulltext (along with some funky functions) that could bring an immense amount of power with dealing with XML?
What is there now? What do people do now? What do they want to do?
All interesting stuff
Personally…
Plain text in DB –> XML (via ASP.net) –> Through XSLT (via ASP.net) –> Output formats (XHTML/XML (RSS, Atom etc)/PDF etc)
Would be great to be able to shift the first step onto the database rather than the scripts.
Do you mean the DB -> XML stage?
What type of query gets the XML out of the DB. Is it just a XML doc in a field?
What type of extension would help?
Or are you wanting rows coming out of a db being in XML already so you can transform them with XSLT into something for your output?
The data is in different fields and different tables.
It would be cool to be able to construct a query, or SP to produce the XML, without having to look through the data in scripts. Perhaps give it a schema and map the fields to the schema’s fields?
I’m not sure… the only time I’ve seen people take XML directly out of a DB is using Documentum (http://www.documentum.com).