NYCPHP Meetup

[Elliotte Harold]

David Krings wrote:

> Don't worry! Finally someone who sees XML as what it is and that it is 
> by far not as glorious and the key to world peace as many claim. In the 
> end XML is an ini file on steroids. And XML without DTD is only half of 
> the pie....so much for self-defining.
>

If all you do is INI files, then all you'll use XML for is INI files. 
Some of us do a little more than that though.

Roughly 80% of the world's data cannot plausibly be stored in a 
relational database. The 20% that does fit there is important enough 
that we've spent the last 20 years stuffing it into relational databases 
and doing interesting things with it. I'm still doing a lot of that.

But there's a lot more data out there that doesn't look like tables than 
does. Much of this data fits very nicely in a native XML database like 
Mark Logic or eXist. There's also data that has some tabular parts and 
some non-tabular parts. This may work well in a hybrid XML-relational 
database like DB2 9.

If your only place to put pegs is a table with square holes, then you're 
going to try pound every peg you find into a square hole. However, some 
of us have noticed that a lot of the pegs we encounter aren't shaped 
like squares, and sometimes we need to buy a different table with 
different shaped holes. :-)

Relational databases didn't take the world by storm overnight. XML 
databases won't either. But they will be adopted because they do let 
people solve problems they have today that they cannot solve with any 
other tools.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/