Chapter 9. The Database Zone
No matter what some industry pundits might say, the relational database is in no danger of being replaced by XML database servers anytime soon. Looking at the history of databases, we see that the idea of a hierarchical database is not a new one. The Information Management Systems of the 1950s and 1960s eventually evolved into the tree-oriented hierarchical databases that have been made all but obsolete by relational databases.
The truth is that relational databases can do a fair job of modeling hierarchical data, but hierarchical formats (such as XML documents) do a very poor job of simulating relational operations. But this doesn't mean that XML won't begin to play an integral part in moving information between ...
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