Hi, 2009/6/2 Walls, Ian <ian.wa...@med.nyu.edu>: > So, the thought occurred to me: since most of these formats are already in > XML (or could be mapped to it easily enough), why not use a Native XML > Database? This would save on mappings, since XQuery would be used to > extract information directly from the XML. It would also be flexible enough > to allow for home-grown Schemas to be mixed in with standards. There would > also be one less translation in getting the information out of storage and > into an AJAX interface.
I agree that having more XML functionality in the DBMS would be handy. Of course, only bibliographic and authority metadata currently require the use of XML, and there's a lot of transactional processing (circulation, acquisitions, etc.) that benefits from the traditional relational structure, so I wouldn't recommend moving the entire schema to a native XML database. MySQL 5.1 goes part of the way by adding the ExtractValue() and UpdateXML() functions to do queries and updates on an XML blob using a subset of XPath, but there's no schema support. However, as long as it doesn't perform too badly, adding multi-metadata support may be enough to justify upgrading to MySQL 5.1, although I notice that 5.1 is still only in Debian experimental. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton VP, Research & Development, LibLime galen.charl...@liblime.com p: 1-888-564-2457 x709 skype: gmcharlt _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha.org http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
