Selim Mimaroglu

This article looks in detail at how to generate XML data from your relational database. Although the examples were run on Oracle, very little of the code is Oracle specific. You can easily use all the ideas and examples presented here in other relational databases. We did this project at University of Massachusetts Boston as part of the Electronic Field Guide (EFG) project. XML is the de facto standard for data exchange. It's simple, Unicode based, and platform independent. XML is a metadata language; it contains information about the data. All these features make it an attractive standard for exchanging data. Why Generate XML from Relational Data? Today most data (80% or more), is stored in relational databases such as Oracle, DB2, SQL Server 2000, and others. The Internet and Web services are present in our daily lives. A tremendous amount of data is transferred ove... (more)

XML Product Review: "Getting to Know Xindice"

Apache Software Foundation's Xindice is an open source native XML database. Apache provides great software to developers such as the Apache Web Server, Tomcat Application Server, Cocoon Web Development Framework, Struts Framework, Ant, and many more under an open source license. Apache Web Server is an industrial-strength product that is used by many high-traffic Web sites. Apache Tomcat is a servlet container that implements both Java Servlets and Java Server Pages. The fact that Xindice is a member of the Apache Software Foundation gives it substantial credibility, because Apac... (more)

eXist - An Introduction To Open Source Native XML Database

In this article I am going to introduce you to the open source, free (GNU LGPL license), native XML database eXist (www.exist-db-org). Data is important, no question about it. Data that can't be queried is not very useful. Users expect to have good query response time. From my personal experience and testing, I am confident in saying that eXist is a fairly good database. It has very good query response time, it is very user friendly, it's easy to set up and operate, and it's written in Java, therefore it is platform independent. This article will show you how to use eXist as a s... (more)

Open Source Database Special Feature: An Introduction to Berkeley DB XML

In this article I am going to introduce you to the latest version of the Berkeley DB XML, version 2.2.8. Berkeley DB XML (BDB XML) is built on top of the well-known Berkeley Database (BDB). BDB XML is an open source, native XML database. Like its ancestor, BDB, it's an embedded database. It provides APIs for the Java, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, and Tcl languages. It supports the popular XML query languages XQuery and XPath 2.0. I will show you how to use BDB XML in two ways. This month I will introduce the BDB XML shell, and next month we will explore using BDB XML with Java. BDB XM... (more)

Storing XML in Relational Database Management Systems

When we need to store XML in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) we have to think of nonnative ways to store it, since the structure of XML does not fit the flat relations of the RDBMSs. Although some RDBMS vendors support XML storage and XQuery such as Oracle 10g (release 2), this support is not yet common. Some of the well-known RDBMSs are Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase IQ, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. If you have one of these products, or a similar product, you should be interested in reading this article. There are several ways to store XML in an RDMS. One p... (more)