Opinions requested

[Marcelo Cantos]

"Jeffrey E. Sussna" wrote:

> There is not (AFAIK) yet any such thing as an XDBMS (though you could consider a file system of XML documements plus a web server to resolve URL's to those documents as such a thing).

I am continually surprised to hear remarks such as this.  SIM _is_ an XDBMS (it is also an SGML, MARC, RTF, etc. database with structure and full content query capabilities).  As an XDBMS it has weaknesses (it only supports predefined indexes and limited structure querying), but in some ways provides a model that is even richer than XML (it provides structure below element level, and has the concept of fields -- both of these features can be accessed through arbitrary expressions, which can be complete programs, for instance a field can contain every other word of paragraphs whose parent section has a "priority" attribute with a numerical value less than 5; it also provides arbitrary document fragmenting capabilities at the application level).  And the weaknesses are not intrinsic to our model -- we have full structure queries slated for the near future (probably in the next six months).

SIM is just one of many XDBMS's avilable on the market, and is one of the fastest, if not _the_ fastest, and most scalable available (at the very least, it is a country mile ahead of (R|OO)DBMS's in terms of XML performance, contrary to the ever-popular notion that the latter are inherently faster than the former -- one client, after migrating their application from a popular RDBMS to SIM, removed the stop button from the query dialog because no-one ever got a chance to see it).

Anyway, enough shameless marketing: XDBMS's do exist today, and they do support high performance storage, querying and retrieval.


Cheers,
Marcelo Cantos

http://www.simdb.com/~marcelo/



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