Industrial Strength XML Serving

[Steve Muench]

| In some of my offlist correspondence, I've detected a dichotomy between
| the view that "it doesn't matter if it's XML, pizza's, or washing machines
| you're storing, it's the size that counts (no pun intended)" -- so
| Oracle's great.  ON the other side, is a sense that 8i's newness is a
| potential unknown for such size in XML (we'll also likely be
| subcontracting the serving of the gifs, likely out-of-state).  The
| implication was that there were more SGML/XML-native packages out there if
| we have the budget (we do, within the limits that, say, commissioning a
| whole new softwre package is out of the question). :)

"Oracle 8i" is "Oracle8i Release 8.1.5", the first
production release of the major enhancement of the
previous "Oracle8 Release 8.0.6".

In addition to the new features that catch lots of
headlines (perhaps giving impression of "newness")
like the XML and Java, it's sometimes easy
to forget that Oracle8i improves on the features
of its predecessor in *every functional area* of
the database, including scalability, maintainability,
reliability as well. The underlying technology
is an evolution of the proven Oracle product, not a
"whole new" database.

| Our project is perhaps one of the best funded efforts in the humanities in
| markup for some time, and surely in a class by itself viz. XML.  As it's
| likely to be a model in various senses/case study, I really want to be
| sure we commit down the "right" road on this, and be sure of our options
| along that road.  The vision I'm implementing from teh XML side is meant
| to go beyond another research resource to a full-scale research
| environment which exploits XSLT for having our stuff accessible--e.g., the
| MARC--in multiple tag vocabularies (DC, RDF, GILS, etc.), as well as very
| sophisticate construction of the resources found through the search (e.g.,
| with DOM, etc.).

The next major release of 8i (release 8.1.6)
comes with our key XML components natively
compiled using our "way ahead of time" compiler
for scalable server-side Java. This means that
XML processing and XSLT transformations running
inside the Oracle8i database have a double-performance
boost:

  (1) Data access is done through an "in-memory"
      JDBC driver, rather than over a network.
      (Same familiar JDBC api, superior performance)

  (2) The XML components will be natively compiled.

The 8.1.6 release also adds significant
improvements to searching of XML Docs and
Doc Fragments in our Intermedia Text engine.

Hope this helps.

______________________________________________
Steve Muench
Consulting Product Manager & XML Evangelist
Business Components for Java Development Team



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