Re: [hfdb] Scope (Was Re: Grand Unified Hardware Database)

[James K. Lowden]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> wrote:
> James, please correct/ enhance whatever I say here as needed: I suspect
> that the main difference between RDBMS and XML storage, is simply one of
> convenience and automation - an RDBMS has mechanisms (such as foreign
> keys checking, constraints checking, and surely others) to help ensure
> that the data going in is valid (and when we discover new "rules" for
> the data, we can easily add those rules to the DB). 

In a nutshell, yes.  

I promise not to expound any more on this topic unless someone expresses
serious disagreement.  I recommend dbdebunk.com as a good place to learn
more on the subject.

> Also, XML can be readily generated from an SQL DB.

Certainly.  And should be.  I hope, though, that an XLST maven or two will
volunteer to transform query results into DTD-defined (at least) XML.  

> The downside is that it means we need to be actually running an RDBMS
> somewhere - and we are hosting on savannah so that is an admin overhead
> that we will be "imposing" on their admins at some point. Plain XML
> storage doesn't have that overhead.

Let's look forward to that problem.  If we define a useful model, and if
we populate a working database with a useful subset of what we want, and
if we can demonstrate its utility to some project, then I doubt it will be
a problem to find on-line technical resources to suppor the ongoing
effort.  

So, scope.  Let's get down to brass tacks.  Who's trying to do what, and
who needs what from the database [model]?  The more particular, the
better.  

--jkl