XML interface to Oracle

[Michael Kay]

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Bryan <mtbryan at sgml.u-net.com>
To: xml-dev at ic.ac.uk <xml-dev at ic.ac.uk>
Date: 15 December 1997 16:14
Subject: XML interface to Oracle


>I have just been asked by the European Commission Statistics Office if
>anyone has yet hooked an XML parser directly to an Oracle database. (They
>need to transfer large amounts of data between heterogeneous databases ...

Then why specify Oracle in the question?

There are at least two obvious ways of representing a table in XML, the main
decision
is whether to represent data values as attributes or as content. No doubt,
given the
richness of XML, the experts could come up with many less obvious
representations
as well. Using any of the parsers I have looked at, any of these formats
could be trivially
translated into the kind of input formats (e.g. CSV files) that existing
RDBMSs will accept.
Or perhaps by "directly" you want to avoid the intermediate CSV file: well
that's not difficult
either but it's more work and I don't see much benefit in it.

There's a class in the MSXML distribution that gives ADO access to an XML
file, which
illustrates what can be done, though of course this is Microsoft
proprietary.

But it all begs the question, what are you (or they) trying to achieve? Is
there really a practical
problem with transferring data between relational databases that XML can
solve? People do
it all the time with various flavours of CSV, so why bother?

Mike Kay


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