Performance improvement for xml loads (+comments)

[Derek Atkins]

Patrick Spinler <spinler.patrick@mayo.edu> writes:

> Derek Atkins wrote:
> > 
> > Well, using MySQL or PostgreSQL is just one part of it.  It's a
> > storage mechanism, but you still need to create the data formats that
> > are stored.  You still need to define the transaction objects or split
> > objects or whatever that get stored in the database.  
> 
> Well, not really.  
> 
> More specifically, on a fundimental level a database will provide a
> number of predefined data types that it will deal with gracefully (int,
> date, money, char, etc).  In order to gain some of the advantages of a
> database, such as ease of access to the data from other applications,
> you really need to use these data types.

I think every programmible data description/storage/transfer/encoding
system has a set of predefined data types that it will deal with
gracefully.  The question is, what are those types and how
standardized are they?  If they are not standard, is there a core set
from which you can build everything else?

> Of course, you can store any arbitrary binary data in a database engine,
> it's called a BLOB in modern parlence.  But what's the point ?  You have
> to have special code to deal with it.

We have to have special code to deal with databases, too.  It's all
code, somewhere.  Maybe we have to write it, maybe it's provided by
another package, or maybe it gets generated for us from some
description file.  But in the end, we still have to come up with the
data formats (call it a schema if you prefer), and we still have to
write the code that will convert between in-core data structures,
on-network data structures, and on-disk data structures.

> > So, defining a
> > binary data format now would certainly be useful, IMHO, down the road
> > when we move to a DBMS.
> 
> As I mention above, I disagree.

Perhaps we can agree to disagree?

> -- Pat

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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