E-Book Overview
The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML is for any developer who works with XML, whatever theapplication. I included an XML overview (Appendix A “XML Essentials”) for developers who aren’tnecessarily familiar with XML. The early chapters address programmers who might be unconvincedof the benefits of either an embedded database or the benefits of XML itself, but there’s also plentyof information there for any converts.
E-Book Content
CYAN MAGENTA YELLOW BLACK PANTONE 123 CV BOOKS FOR PROFESSIONALS BY PROFESSIONALS ® THE EXPERT’S VOICE ® IN OPEN SOURCE Companion eBook Available The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML The Definitive Guide to Dear Reader, Danny Brian Join online discussions: forums.apress.com RELATED TITLES FOR PROFESSIONALS BY PROFESSIONALS ™ Companion eBook Berkeley DB XML Too often, form follows function—far too often when form is data and function is code. Code was created for data, not data for code. Useful data is valuable and interesting, meaningful outside of code or applications that operate upon it. We spend a lot of time and resources on getting data into the form appropriate for the function: tables for individual pieces of data, tables to map between tables, tables to express hierarchy, meta-table about tables… XML is attractive for its simplicity, flexibility, and ubiquity. This is already realized in the exchange of data: HTML, RSS feeds, RPC/SOAP, and thousands of proprietary dialects belong to the XML family. XML is easily read, understood, maintained, and manipulated with hundreds of compatible tools. Still, most served data is stored in relational databases, converted to and from XML at request or dump time. So why aren’t we storing data in XML to begin with? Two reasons. First, we need to index and execute complex queri