General: Databases, XML and CMS

Hi, everyone!

I've been thinking about Content Management for quite a while now and came about then same problem again and again:

1. It means some great advantages to process content as XML data.
2. You do not always want to or are not always able to utilize a native XML database.

So, the question is:
What seems to be the best way - since there are at least two possibilities: a) storing the whole XML doc as a single text blob or varchar or similar - or b) try to render the XML structure to one single row per element in the db ...

I'd be grateful for any opinion, alternative or useful tip!
Thanks in advance,
rrohm

Try an XML Database.

What exactly are these advantages, in your opinion? Without knowing what you want to do with XML, it's impossible to give a good opinion about how to manage it.


neobuddah... you missed this part .

> What exactly are these advantages, in your opinion?

Especially I think about content management systems and related tasks. For example, try to see one page of site content as an xml tree that consists of several elements. These don't need to be plain text, they also might be simple markers (pseudo tags) with user-defined attirbutes that stand for content modules like news tickers, subscribe boxes, site navigation and so on. In my opinion such structures cannot be implemented without xml (or a substitute) in a reasonable way. If you try to work around it, you at last will end up with something that is more or less a substitute of xml.

Well... you can, if you think in terms of "hyper-text fragments", and store each type in a seperate table, or a single table with a TYPE field. You'd then need to combine these into a document by linking each fragment into a document.