Beginning XML, 4th Edition

Chapter 10. XML and Databases

The volume of XML used by businesses is increasing as enterprises send increasing numbers of messages as XML. Many websites use XML as a data store, which is transformed into HTML or XHTML for online display. The diversity of sources of XML data is increasing, too. For example, a new generation of forms products and technologies, such as Microsoft's InfoPath and W3C XForms, is also beginning to supply XML data directly to data stores such as Microsoft Access or SQL Server from forms filled in by a variety of information workers.

To monitor business activity, you need to be able to store or exchange possibly huge amounts of data as XML and to recognize the benefits of XML's flexibility to reflect the structure of business data and to process or interchange it further. In addition, XML is being used increasingly for business-critical data, some of which is particularly confidential and needs to be secured from unauthorized eyes. This raises many issues that need to be considered when storing XML in a production setting. It isn't enough that data is available as XML; other issues such as security and scalability enter the picture, too.

In Chapter 9 you looked at XQuery, the XML query language under development at the W3C. This chapter covers broader issues that relate to the use of XML with databases. These issues are illustrated with examples that use XML with a native XML database and two different XML-enabled SQL databases.

This chapter includes the following: ...