Gnucash versions

[John Ralls]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 7:27 AM, Colin Law wrote:

> On 7 October 2011 16:20, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
>> On vrijdag 7 oktober 2011, Jean-David Beyer wrote:
>>> Colin Scott wrote:
>>>> There is one potential benefit of using a SQL store over an XML one
>>>> that they probably won't tell you - you can read the data using tools
>>>> other than gnucash!
>> Technically there is no difference here between the SQL storage over the XML
>> one. There are also xml parsers to extract data from an xml file. Try to open
>> your (uncompressed) data file with firefox for example. The xml data format
>> may not really make a lot of sense to someone who is more accustomed to sql
>> tables, but someone proficient with xml and xslt can easily whip up the same
>> reports you are dreaming of creating with SQL. So this is not a particular
>> benefit in itself and that's one reason it specifically mentioned as such.
>> Which data format is preferred is merely based on prior knowledge.
> 
> I am not entirely sure about that, it is correct in principle, but I
> am not sure how easy it would be, for example, to use xslt to  produce
> a report from the start of financial year to the start of the current
> month, showing expenditure on all expense accounts that do not have a
> corresponding entry in the budget (ie an Unbudgeted Expenditure
> report).
> 

Well, if XSLT isn't sufficient, there's XQuery. 

Regards,
John Ralls