The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML [Hardcover]

Danny Brian (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590596668 | ISBN-13: 978-1590596661 | Publication Date: August 23, 2006 | Edition: 1

XML is the industry standard for the sharing, formatting, and processing of data. Still, the bulk of applications that require persistent storage use relational databases, converting data to and from XML, and adding overhead, latency, and unnecessary application layers. This book covers Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, an embedded XML database, and will show you how to avoid that added overhead by utilizing a storage mechanism that stores the data natively in XML. Berkeley DB XML runs on all major operating systems and has support for the most popular programming languages.

Berkeley DB XML has the potential to dramatically change and simplify the development of your application's data tier. Programmers and engineers owe it to themselves to understand the technologies that are taught in this book. XML developers love it for its elegance: BDB XML brings that same elegance to the data store: no more SQL, no more database daemons, no more complex schemas or table techniques to make semantically rich data relational. Of course relational database have and will always have a place in network applications. But for a large portion of the applications being built, BDB XML is a superior solution.

Danny Brian presents XML basics from the ground up, installation and configuration of Berkeley DB XML, and then delves into the cutting-edge technologies behind Berkeley DB XML: flexible XML indexing, powerful queries with XPath 2.0, and complex operations using XQuery and FLWOR expressions. The book continues with coverage of the API for C++, Java, Perl, Python, and PHP. In this book you will also learn how to manage the database and learn tips and tricks that you can immediately apply to your own applications.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Danny Brian has been programming for over 20 years. Since the advent of Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, his major development interests have been natural language processing, games, and XML technologies. Danny is a regular speaker at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, starting in 2001, and won the Damian Conway award for Technical Excellence that same year. Formerly a columnist for The Perl Journal, he has recently worked as an analyst and software engineer for NTT/Verio, and today is CEO of an entertainment startup.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (August 23, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596668
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596661
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #531,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > XML

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Really, and I mean really really really, bad., June 27, 2008

By 

Jim Idle (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML (Hardcover)

I tend not to buy too many technical books because they are usually written by someone who had the time to write them not someone that knows anything. They are usually out of date, and quite often only tell you what you can find in man pages anyway. Still you sometimes pick up a few tips that you might save you a little time.

I was somewhat surprised then to find, as I read through the myriad editing errors and appalling grammar in this 'book' that there wasn't actually ANY useful content at all. In fact if you don't know anything about databases or XML before you read this book, then you will take away some very strange ideas about data such as what is/should be repeating groups, why you use attributes and so. These will probably harm you rather than help.

Even the editing sucks in this book. Obviously someone (well you know who they are because they all get introduced as stars at the front) went through the book and looked for things that might not be obvious, inserting a few explanations. It is a pity they didn't know anything about the subject as they might have been able to put some information in the book. Instead we now find that apparently 'IDE' stands for Integrated Design Electronics - seriously, it is even indexed that way, pointing to page 74. Nice proof reading by the author.

So there I am, getting more and more annoyed with what I thought was just background noise to introduce the subject, turn the page, and... that's it. End of book. Suddenly trips off into a few crummy examples of calling a few methods in a few languages (including Perl for the love of Zarquon) then less than half way through you are at Appendix A, a (weak) introduction to XML and Xpath for a few pages, followed by a huge listing of all the API calls, which are freely available on the web anyway, from whence they were cut and pasted 2 or 3 years ago.

So, this book isn't really about Berkeley DB XML at all - in fact I am not sure what it is about, it is just a random collection of words with some arrant nonsense thrown in to see if you are listening.

Don't buy this, just buy "The Berkeley DB Book" by the same publisher, if you even need that; at least that book has a few decent bits of information in it. Where do I find the negative stars rating? I think the other reviews are by friends and the publisher - they didn't read the same 'book' that I did. Give me my money back! :-(

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Resource for anyone interested in using XML to store data, August 31, 2006

By 

John N. Davis - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML (Hardcover)

Danny Brian writes in a very straight forward and very easy to understand method. The book works well as a training tool and has a resource for anything you could ever want to know on XQuery and Berkeley DB. Finally someone compiled the information on XQuery and put it in one easy to use resource as an appendix (Book is worth it just for this!). Book also has a great appendix for people just starting out in XML or even if you just need to brush up on your XML syntax. Even if you are not interested in Berkeley DB you will be by the time you read this!

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DB XML review, October 20, 2010

By 

Joel - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML (Hardcover)

I like the book, shows both C++ and perl style code to parse XML formats...it doesn't cover libxml which I was looking for, but I learn another way to do it :)