XML and Perl

Chapter Roadmap

This chapter discusses how you can use Perl to produce XML documents using a database as your data source. As you will see, one of the largest uses of XML is as a data storage facility. Because XML is based on a hierarchical data format, it’s suitable to store almost any information, and it has the capability to mimic some of the capabilities found in relational database management systems (RDBMSs). However, because XML is stored in a text format, data cannot be retrieved as quickly or stored as efficiently compared to the binary formats used by modern RDBMSs. So, XML probably won’t be replacing databases anytime in the near future, although a number of people are working very hard to develop XML-based databases. Currently, ...