Imagine a customer has hired you to put together a solution for managing a
huge quantity of XML information. The firm's team is using XML because it
gives them flexibility in how the data is structured. They like the fact that
they do not need to specify a given record structure up front, and they can
change the XML structure of records whenever they need to. Still, the
question remains, "How do you manage and search for records?"
One choice, of course, would be to put the data into a relational database.
This approach is not always convenient because you need to decide ahead of
time what the schema of the tables will be. Such a database will need to be
managed, and any changes in requirements will demand changes in the schema as
well as migration of the data. A second o... (more)