Customer Reviews

Data on the Web: From Relations to Semistructured Data and XML (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

For the most part, this book covers the academic research on semistructured database management that started in the mid-90s (pre-dating the XML explosion - sometimes research is ahead of practice!). Such issues are not that interesting for folks who are doing bread-and-butter client-side XML development, and whose interest in "XML" and "databases" is limited to knowing how Oracle 8i implements its "XML out the top" package. However, the book is relevant to people who are already "in" the semistructured data management space - people who are thinking ahead to some of the potential directions that XML query languages might take, for example. The authors are prominent and well-respected in this area.

One of my main beefs with the book is that it does not really say anything about what XML databases might look like in practice. This is a tall and perhaps unfair order, since we don't yet have standards for XML schemas and query languages. But I have yet to see XML database proponents provide a clear and convincing explanation of why XML is going to be a way to structure stored data as well as a way of transmitting and reformatting data.

This book gives an excellent introduction into the formal framework underlying XML. It exposes an important connection between XML and the existing research in databases about the semistructured data model. XML is about to becoming a crucial standard - not just for data exchange, but also for representing data in databases.

The book describes the formal framework behind XML and describes several crucial issues such as querying and storing XML efficiently.

This book is a must for all people interested in XML!

The book provides a wonderful link of the three concepts: Relation, Semistructured , and XML. The discussion is clear and concise. We know that Relation is well used in modelling enterprise data today, since the high performance of RDBMS . On the other hand, XML is well accepted the most suitable for business information representation. The author uniformed them under the banner of semistructured data model. The text drives the readers into the insight of the data world even though it is in the abstract level. Anyone can be benifitted by reading it if he want to go deep in the XML and data world.

Read this book and understand it unless you want to flounder around solving problems that these guys already thought through. The book is not a "how-to" guide, but rather a discussion of all the abstract concepts you need to master if you want to do things right. I found this book far more readable than some of the research these guys have published, and a very useful starting point for evaluating various products and technologies related to XML and web data.

Read this book and understand it unless you want to flounder around solving problems that these guys already thought through. The book is not a "how-to" guide, but rather a discussion of all the abstract concepts you need to master if you want to do things right. I found this book far more readable than some of the research these guys have published, and a very useful starting point for evaluating various products and technologies related to XML and web data.

I should have listened to "this textbook isn't for the ordinary Web developer", not "this book is a must for all people interested in XML!" The book is quite academic. It presents a formalism for describing semi-structured data and queries on those data, then illustrates how XML, XML-QL, XSL, etc can be understood in terms of that formalism. I am not sure who would find this useful -- perhaps the people who are working on new extensions to XML itself? Or a person who is designing parsers? Probably not a person who is just trying to use XML.