This tutorial article gives a high-level overview of how to use XML with databases. It discusses and shows how the differences between data-centric and document-centric documents affect their usage with databases, how XML is usually used with relational databases, and what native XML databases are and when to use them.
XML and Databases
- 1.0 Introduction
- 2.0 Is XML a Database?
- 3.0 Why Use a Database?
- 4.0 Data versus Documents
- 5.0 Storing and Retrieving Data
- 5.1 Mapping Document Schemas to Database Schemas
- 5.2 Query Languages
- 5.3 Storing Data in a Native XML Database
- 5.4 Data Types, Null Values, Character Sets, and All That Stuff
- 5.4.1 Data Types
- 5.4.2 Binary Data
- 5.4.3 Null Data
- 5.4.4 Character Sets
- 5.4.5 Processing Instructions and Comments
- 5.4.6 Storing Markup
- 5.5 Generating XML Schemas from Relational Schemas and Vice Versa
- 6.0 Storing and Retrieving Documents
- 6.1 Storing Documents in the File System
- 6.2 Storing Documents in BLOBs
- 6.3 Native XML Databases
- 6.3.1 What is a Native XML Database?
- 6.3.2 Native XML Database Architectures
- 6.3.3 Features of Native XML Databases
- 6.3.3.1 Document Collections
- 6.3.3.2 Query Languages
- 6.3.3.3 Updates and Deletes
- 6.3.3.4 Transactions, Locking, and Concurrency
- 6.3.3.5 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
- 6.3.3.6 Round-Tripping
- 6.3.3.7 Remote Data
- 6.3.3.8 Indexes
- 6.3.3.9 External Entity Storage
- 6.3.4 Normalization, Referential Integrity, and Scalability
- 6.4 Persistent DOMs (PDOMs)
- 6.5 Content Management Systems
- 7.0 XML Database Products
- 8.0 Additional Links
- 9.0 Comments and Feedback