Chapter 10. Oracle XML Support

XML, short for Extensible Markup Language has become one of the most widely used formats in the business world to represent data since it was first published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1996. XML provides a representation for semistructured data that is human readable and platform independent yet flexible enough to overcome the rigidity of two-dimensional data representation models (such as the standard relational databases we all know today).

To get an idea of how XML can be effectively used, consider the following example, which captures the details of a purchase order in a structured fashion and is highly portable to other systems:

<PurchaseOrder PoNumber="PO0001"> <InitiatedBy>Preston Cole</InitiatedBy> ...

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