hello,
I’m sort of newcomer in world of XML.
I’ve one doubt and I am eagerly hoping that you can help me out here.
I want to know can OODBMS support xml data?
if yes, any idea which OODBMS?
or do we have to have XML databases to store xml data?
plz help !
Thanks
A number of OODBMS vendors have tried to reengineer their products as XML databases, and to some extent, this is achievable - it’s certainly a more reasonable thing to do than storing XML in a relational database. But it’s not actually very easy. A naive representation of XML as objects (just storing a DOM as objects in an OODBMS) will be very inefficient because of the sheer number of objects and pointers, which occupy a lot of space and take a lot of time to retrieve, even with a memory-mapped OODB using pointer swizzling. And you still have the problem of creating indexes, and optimizing queries so that the indexes are actually used - using OQL as your query language rather than XQuery would not be very user-friendly.
Another approach is to store “business objects” rather than “DOM objects” in your OODBMS. I’ve got experience of projects that tried to do that. We ended up with successful applications, but only after a lot of design problems finding an efficient mapping, and also some horrendous performance problems in database loading.
I think OODBs have a lot to offer in handling complex data such as engineering CAD data, but the development costs and design effort are much higher than an XML database.
Michael Kay