> I think unifying relational data and XML is a good move.
Unifying it would be. It's mixing it without unifying it that's the problem.
> Imagine that an organization has data in RDBMS, as well in
> the XML form. That organization needs to produce something
> (for e.g. reports of some kind, or say an application) by
> unifying information from the relational and XML world. Then
> we need to join data stored in the RDBMS and XML. If we don't
> have a unified relational/XML store, I think, it'll be
> slightly difficult to join data from the two worlds (although
> not difficult for good application programmers).
It's like mixed-language programming. It's useful to be able to do it, but
you make life much easier for yourself if you can find a way to avoid it.
Sometimes that means being bold about refactoring your systems, and these
days I tend to reckon that effort spent on refactoring nearly always has a
positive payback.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
