Why use an XML database?
Before considering an investment in a data server which offers native XML storage (one which doesn’t decompose it, nor store it as an unstructured chunk; and which allows the user to query its arbitrary individual elements), it’s necessary to take a step back and see what XML as a storage method offers the Web developer. • What sort of information should be stored as XML? The examples cited by Elliotte include large documents where the document itself is composed of related data, yet which it would be inefficient to break down into related tables and columns. A book can be broken down logically into a title and an abstract but what about the individual paragraphs in each chapter? What of the table of contents and index which are derived dynamically from data which exists elsewhere in the document? • Why can’t this data be stored in another format? It can be stored, but how do you make use of it? You might shred it, but this requires time to decompose and then recompose, assuming you ca
