October 23rd, 2007

Databases and XML are both vital components of today's Internet and web applications. Often, however, they're thought of being on distant ends of the technology spectrum. This October, New York PHP is pleased to have recognized XML and Java author Elliotte Rusty Harold speak on what it means when these two worlds start to talk - natively.

While much data and many applications fit very neatly into tables, even more data doesn't. Books, encyclopedias, web pages, legal briefs, poetry, and more is not practically normalizable. SQL will continue to rule supreme for accounting, human resources, taxes, inventory management, banking, and other traditional systems where it's done well for the last twenty years. However, many other applications in fields like publishing have not even had a database backend. It's not that they didn't need one. It's just that the databases of the day couldn't handle their needs, so content was simply stored in Word files in a file system. These applications are going to be revolutionized by XQuery and XML.

If you're working in publishing, including web publishing, you owe it to yourself to take a serious look at the available XML databases. This high-level talk explains what XML databases are good for and when you might choose one over a more traditional solution. You'll learn about the different options in both open and closed source XML databases including pure XML, hybrid relational-XML, and other models.

Thanks to IBM for providing a great presentation space with seating for plenty.

As a service to our community, New York PHP User Community meetings are always free and open to the public.