Re: [xsl] Create a web interface to query a XML database

Subject: Re: [xsl] Create a web interface to query a XML database
From: Manuel Souto Pico <m.soutopico@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 13:39:54 +0200
Hi Michael,

Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback. It seems it would be worth
for me to give a chance to one of those XML db systems, if only to
spare me or whoever the effort of converting the XML document to SQL
every time a new file is to be added to the collection. I don't
envisage to be using many or very big XML documents (although of
course they will always be bigger than a MySQL database) but I would
need to do updates, so I guess either eXist or Tamino would be
suitable.

In principle this is my last mail on this list about this topic, now
that it's clear that it's not necessarily related to XSLT. Thanks to
all for your patience and sorry about the relative off-topic. And as
usual, thank you so much for your help!

Cheers, Manuel




2009/10/1 Michael Schdfer <michael.schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Manuel Souto Pico schrieb:
>>
>> I forgot to mention something which is important in taking a decision
>> as for what technology to use. With PHP-MySQL the user can send
>> queries to the database from a web form and get the results -- I
>> understood this can be done with XRX/XSLT/etc. However, with PHP-MySQL
>> I can also input data to the database and add new registers or
>> maintain the database updating the content of certain existing
>> registers, with phpmyadmin or with ad-hoc web forms. Can this be done
>> with the XML-based technologies?
>>
> We've been using variuos XML (Tamino, eXist, Sedna) and relational db
> systems
> (MySQL, Oracle) as a backend for a web app that receives and sends XML
> files.
> All of the mentioned XML db systems support XQuery, but implement it
> differently, since updates are not standardised in XQuery. There is a fair
> amount of similarity, but if you don't want to rely on a specific product
> it will probably cost you a lot of work to abstract away from the database.
>
> Our general experience is that queries can be very fast in all mentionend
> XML db systems. However, updates and large data volumes separate the wheat
> from
> the chaff. eXist's performance (last version we used was 1.2.1) degraded
> fast
> when the number of docs exceeded several thousands, so it seems it cannot
> handle
> large data volumes. On the other hand, eXist has very good standards
> support.
> Sedna was very fast with queries, even when we had over one million docs in
> the
> database, but updates to a single doc could take up to ten minutes then.
> Adding
> docs was still very fast. Only Tamino showed good performance with both
> queries
> and updates, regardless of the data volume.
>
> However, both MySQL and Oracle outperformed the XML db systems in every
> aspect
> and required far less disk space. And there are ORM frameworks like
> Hibernate
> that make it easy to switch between relational db sytems.
>
> BTW, clients interface withe the web app through web services, so no
> XSLT involved here.
>
> If you have further questions around our experience with XML db systems, I
> suggest you email directly to me, since this is certainly off-topic.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
>
> *  michael.schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxx    http://www.destatis.de
> *                                  http://www.statspez.de
> *-----------------------------------------------------------

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