Industrial Strength XML Serving

[Michael Champion]

----- Original Message -----
From: John Robert Gardner <jrgardn at emory.edu>
To: 'xml-mailinglist' <xml-dev at ic.ac.uk>
Cc: John Robert Gardner -Ph.D. <jrgardn at emory.edu>
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 1999 9:23 AM
Subject: Industrial Strength XML Serving


>
> I'm venturing this question as a general call for input--and pitches--with
> regard to the following project we're undertaking:
>
> 750,000 pages of journals, in both text form and gif images for
> "canonical preservation" and cross-check
>
> Typed text version,  in XML (using TEI largely) yielding
> ~400,000,000 words (our initial estimates suggest
> something in the range of 30-50 gigs of total content
> including gifs), avg.'d to ~60,000,000 tag nodes,
> searchable based on content of tags (word strings),
> element heirarchy, and attribute values, with final form
> changing infrequently (archival/institutional memory)

OK, you asked for pitches, I'll give you Software AG's pitch for our
just-released native XML database called Tamino.
see http://www.softwareag.com/tamino

While relational databases create the context to the data through tables,
columns, joins etc., they work best with data that fits to this structure.
As soon as the data has left the database, its meaning relies totally on the
further processing applications. In complex environments this often leads to
problems which are hard to fix like unexpected application behavior, lack of
scalability and maintainability.

XML objects are stored "natively" in Tamino. Direct storage of XML objects
without further conversion to other data structures is the basis for
Tamino's excellent performance. In other words, there is NO MAPPING LAYER
between the XML you see and the underlying database structures.  This
eliminates having to do an analysis of which XML elements are to be stored
in an efficiently searchable manner and which are to be stored as something
like BLOBs.

Finally, Software AG has been developing industrial strength database
systems for something like 30 years now.  Our Adabas product is widely used
in environments where absolute reliability, near-infinite scalability, TRUE
24:7 availability (i.e, you can lose millions of dollars if the database is
EVER offline for maintenance), etc. are requirements.

Tamino is initially available on NT, and (I'm not sure of the details,
commitments, etc.) will become available on a wide variety of server and
mainframe platforms.

> I've been asking offlist for possible consultants as our systems staff has
> a strong inclination to Oracle 8i and I'm hardly fluent enough on such
> software to argue based upon what I know.  Based on Oracle's white paper,
> it sounds viable . . . however

I can say without fear of contradiction that Oracle 8i has a *great*
whitepaper.  I'd suggest you look closer at the actual product, its
customers, and the alternatives before assuming that it's the obvious choice
for XML storage.

Thanks,

Mike Champion
Software AG


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