Quote Originally Posted by hobbes
@LKBrwn_DBA: I hope that the article you linked to was meant only in jest. If it is sincerely intended then IMHO it appears written with a myopic perspective. [Or maybe it is dated - many arguments it makes do not hold in the present times, either for Oracle or for XML.]

Just so that it does not misguide people who miss the joke and are seriously considering using XML DB in Oracle, here are some counter points.
Just to insure that people don't take the article above as a joke but as a warning, here is my view about xml .

XML is a very practical and flexible way to exchange data, for that it is just great, especially when exchanging data between different systems/languages. Now, even for that there are big drawbacks that often make you say at first "Wow, yeah xml would be great for that", and at second sight, "finally, I can certainly do without it" :

- let's face it, XML is huge in terms of size, so even if it may be very suitable for some systems, it may be simply out of way for some intensive real-time systems with remote data processing (through a leased line for example)
- furthermore, the parsing of xml uses a lot of memory and is very cpu intensive compared to other, less generic, exchange protocols (we are managing exchange data and are using a proprietary protocol because xml would have killed us)

Now concerning storage of xml data, IMO the only situation where it could be useful is when you receive structured XML data from some data provider and you have no control over data integrity. (in our case, we could have done so for our news provider, for example).

For any other storage concern, just use relational tables because you will gain performance, use less memory, use less storage size, have a more sophisticated constraint management... Data integrity is simply not maintainable with XML. XML Schema is good for XML, but it remains XML. There is no way XML will ever be a better storage management system than retational DBMSs. Objects may be someday, XML will never.

Just my 2 cents ,

Regards,

rbaraer