In this book, we look at how to integrate XML into your current relational data source strategies. With the increasing amount of data stored in relational databases, and the importance of XML as a format for marking up data - whether it be for storage, display, interchange, or processing - you need to have command of four key skills: understanding how to structure, process, access, and store your data.
By introducing guidelines for how to model your XML documents in relational databases and how to model relational database information as XML, we will establish structures that enable quick and efficient access, and make our data more flexible. We then look at the developer's XML toolbox, discussing associated technologies and strategies that will help us in describing, processing, and manipulating data. We also discuss common techniques for data access, data warehousing, transmission, and marshalling and presentation, giving working examples in every chapter.
Whether you are using XML for storage, as an interchange format, or for display, this book looks at some of the key issues you should be aware of when structuring, processing, accessing, and storing your documents.
Besides a tutorial for learning how to use XML as an effective way to represent and transmit data across the Web,
Professional XML Databases covers how to work with it in the current generation of Microsoft tools like Internet Explorer and
SQL Server 2000. For any developer or manager who works with databases on the Windows platform, this book shows how you can delve into XML today for real projects.
With endorsements from virtually every major vendor (including Microsoft), XML looks to be a compelling standard for sharing corporate data between organisations. Professional XML Databases examines how to integrate XML into your organisation's database infrastructure. Early sections concentrate on the rules and strategies for designing effective XML documents (DTDs) which mimic traditional tables (including links between tables). By providing almost a dozen rules of how to do this correctly, you'll learn not only the basics of XML syntax but also the correct way to create DTDs that are efficient, easy to maintain and readable. (Further sections reverse this process and show how to create database tables based on XML.)
Subsequent sections cover many of the standards and APIs in today's XML, from XML Schemas, the XML W3C Document Object Model (DOM), the Simple API for XML (SAX), as well as related standards like XSLT, XPath and XPointer. A number of books cover these APIs, but this one provides a unique focus by examining Microsoft tools and its support for XML. This means coverage of Microsoft ADO (and ADO+, now called ADO.NET) for querying databases and packaging the results as XML. Sections on SQL Server 2000 highlight ways to use XML in this product, both as results and through XML views.
Closing sections explore options for working with XML for data warehousing and transmitting data efficiently across organisations. Sections on Java and the DBPrism (an open-source XML framework) help give this book a perspective which extends beyond the Microsoft platform.
For any database developer or designer who needs to create XML documents to share data in real projects, this advanced treatise on the right way to define and use XML will prove highly valuable. For anyone who uses SQL Server 2000, this book also points the way toward using XML standards in actual shipping products on the Microsoft platform. --Richard Dragan
