Customer Reviews

Designing XML Databases

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

XML is a critical emerging technology which has the potential to revolutionize database connectivity in enterprise software development. While the author provides knowledge about XML document design and delivery, the book falls short of providing meaningful insights to those who wish to construct integrated commercial XML/Database systems.

The writer doesn't seem to have a good idea of the history and development of these database concepts for commercial use. For example, he doesn't seem to know that Object databases have had repeated failures in terms of performance, maintainability and a host of other factors in mission critical applications.

He would have gained by referencing "Foundation for Future Database Systems: The Third Manifesto," by C.J. Date and High Darwin, and by familiarzing himself with "The Great Debate," where E.F. Cobb demonstrated how non-relational models are orders of magnitude more complex than relational models for the same problem.

As someone who has architected and developed large scale XML-based database applications, I sense that the author has come from a perspective of writing specialty XML document delivery databases for non-commercial purposes in the biotechnology industry, and provides minimal material which would be useful to anyone seeking to implement industrial strength XML databases (in an application server, for example) or to use XML messaging with relational databases (e..g., with webMethods and Rendezvous' Tibco.)

The author has a writing style which is quite chatty and unprofessional, which continually distracts from its purpose, which is to compare XML, Relational and Object database design issues. Buy this book to skim through it as a reference, but do not expect it to be of great value to many of the issues that are likely to be faced in building enterprise class databases. You can find better information of a higher quality on this subject for free by visiting [certain websites] and reading many of their XML-related articles. It may be of more value if you only wish to create XML document servers.

The author discusses some interesting topics, but I found the book far too full of vague statements about the usefulness of various ways of encoding XML and of database architecture. Similarly, the chapter on querying XML databases was enough to whet my appetite, but it was mostly on the representation of queries (useful, to be sure, but confusingly presented), had little about efficiency considerations (surely of paramount importance when discussing queries), and presented as "algorithms" methods that are so unrefined and simplistic that they're better labeled "query methodologies."

To be fair, I haven't been all that impressed with the other XML books I've been skimming...

This is a great book, very useful for programmers, database developers, students, system architects, and anyone else who wishes to effectively use, design, or build XML databases. A basic knowledge of XML and databases is assumed, and the focus of this book is on pulling them together. Some advanced techniques are described in this book and the presentation is fairly dense in those areas.

The book covers variety of topics like:
How to design a schema for an existing XML DBMS beginning with the concepts of the field being modeled and resulting in compatible schemas for XML documents, relational databases, and object-oriented applications.
How to store XML data in a relational DBMS, object-oriented DBMS, or flat files, and how to make decisions on which approach to choose.
How to design a system architecture that contains an XML database, Web server, and user applications.
How to develop a user interface for XML data accessed via a Web browser or Java application.
How to query an XML database and what algorithms support XML database querying.
How to create a native store for an XML DBMS.

The book is kind of blur and not much indication on how to do it. It is not worth to get one actually.

This book. Is what it is. The ideas presented are not new.
It's full of code which should have been left out of the book.
His writing style is hard to read. He goes off on tangents that make no sense.
A very bad book.