Storing Lots of Fiddly Bits (was Re: What is XML for?)

[Borden, Jonathan]

Paul Prescod wrote:

>
>
> "W. Eliot Kimber" wrote:
... I suspect that the
> > solution requires an entirely new way of thinking about storing little
> > fiddly bits of data that is neither relational nor object nor
> > object-relational, but is entirely else (or at least
> significantly enough
> > else to be something different).
>
> I think we have a definitional problem. I call anything that handles
> "little fiddly graphs of data with links and annotations" an object
> database. Is there someone in XML-DEV land with a better definition?
> --
	Object databases don't have any particular claim in this area. The current
varieties seem more suited to work with particular languages (e.g. c++ or
java). Oracle has announced an DOM interface in 8i, ObjectDesign  a DOM
interface in eXcelon .. so, the only difference is how easy they are to work
with and how fast they process specific tasks (oh ... and how much they cost
:-)

	I doubt there is much new under the sun. Back in circa 1981 I was working
with a LISP derived language called Grasper (written by Dan Corkill) that
was designed to represent and manipulate directed graphs. We used this to
write a relational database which was used to process geneological (i.e.
tree) data. so there you have it... you can do anything with anything, it
just depends on how much work you want to do and how fast you want it to
run.


Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net


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