Bill Trippe posted the content of his 2002 EContent magazine article on how relational database vendors support XML. The article is interesting, and worth a read. Trippe says he is re-examining the conclusions. I look forward to seeing what he says on the topic.
When I last investigated this issue (last summer), I ran into a number of roadblocks. I was mostly using Microsoft's SQL Server 2000. Overall, the XML support was clunky, and it felt like the afterthought that it was. My biggest problem (for the application I was working on, that is) was with updates. There was no way to update parts of an XML record. You had to read the entire XML snippet from the database, parse it, make the changes, then store the record again. Not exactly efficient. I'd love to be able to just write a single SQL statement that could do the update. It would maybe look like this:
UPDATE tablename
SET xml(columnname,'/xpath/query/to/data') = 'value'
Posted by Karl
January 20, 2004 09:09 AM