Re: is GiST still alive?

Christopher Browne wrote:

>But I think back to the XML generator I wrote for GnuCash; it has the
>notion of building up a hierarchy of entities and attributes, each of
>which is visible as an identifyable object of some sort.  Mapping that
>onto a set of PostgreSQL relations wouldn't work terribly well.
>  
>

*nod* I have tried this several times - it just doesn't work well, 
because the maps are too different.

You could do something like this:  . a table for each element type, fields being the attributes, plus 
the node id.  . a table to tie everything together (parent_id, child_id, 
child_order, child_type).
In theory you could even generate the DB schema from an XML schema and 
evaluate it with XPath-like expressions.

But why put yourself to such bother? I have never found a good reason to 
do this sort of thing.

cheers

andrew