Re: PostgreSQL's XML support comparison against other RDBMSes

Ted Byers schrieb:
> May I ask a question about this?
>
> I will be working on an older database in which the original developer
> stored XML documents as a single variable length text field.  To process
> it, it has to be retrieved in full and parsed.  But the structure of it
> is simple in that it has an element for each field in the DB that
> replaced the earily version.  But people are still using the earlier one
> because they still need access to the old data and no tool has yet been
> written by my predecessors to move the old data over to the new DB.
> Does the XML support you're all talking about make it less tedious to
> develop tools to parse these old XML files and put their data into the
> right field of the right table?  I can develop the tool our users need
> using the resources I have at hand, but the proces of parsing these XML
> files is certain to be very tedious; something I am not looking forward
> to.  There is a reason I don't do much with XML even though I know how.
>
Hm. well if my mind does not fool me you wrote the exact posting
sometime ago ;)

and I also remember answers in the region of parsing it with a stored
function and for your legacy application put a view.

Otoh, if you want it "smarter" and "nicer" you could write a whole
datatype with default input/output is your plain XML text.

However - since XML is very generic you cannot expect some standards
implementation to cover all _your_ needs. I would just use a dom
or sax parser in my favourite scripting language and distribute
the items over some tables as dom nodes and out the whole logic
into a custom datatype.

Regards
Tino