Re: is GiST still alive?

In the last exciting episode, zeitling(at)informatik(dot)hu-berlin(dot)de (Gregor Zeitlinger) wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>> But why put yourself to such bother? I have never found a good reason to
>> do this sort of thing.
> I think there is a huge potential for XML databases once there are good
> ones and people start using them more extensively.
> But for having real fast xml databases it's too slow to store them in
> relational tables. After all, if you were designing a database for xml
> data only - would you come up with tables to store them?

No, "tables" wouldn't be the right way to do it.

But it's going to be troubled, in any case, because of the
every-popular mixtures of:

a) Often weird declarations of what character sets are in use;

b) Pointers to other parts of a document;

c) What's a "database" going to consist of? One XML document? Or
many? And if many, then then how do you have a centralized
reference point to navigate from to find the document that you
want?

And "navigate" was a carefully chosen word; what you then have is
essentially a network database system, and have to then start making
up ways of describing queries. XQuery may be better than CODASYL of
yesteryear, but you're still left writing a lot of recursive code.
(Thus making those that understand the Lambda Nature more powerful...)

At the end, do you have a "database?" Or just a set of documents?
It's hard to tell, a priori.

And do you think this is likely to be useful because:

a) You have some clear notion as to why this ought to be useful?

or merely because

b) XML is a big buzzword, and people have been able to succesfully
attract "research funds" or "vulture capital" on the basis of
having that acronym in a proposal?

The latter seems to have been really common the last few years, as
people seem often to add "Java" and "XML" to proposals in order to
attract unwary investors in much the same way that a "lady of the
evening" wears scanty clothing in order to attract her customers.
--
wm(X,Y):-write(X),write('@'),write(Y). wm('aa454','freenet.carleton.ca').
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/lisp.html
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.