Microsoft adding XML files to Office 12

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Not quite overlooked

We are all used to thinking about the relational model in terms of SQL databases.

However, it is not widely known that SQL is a very flawed implementation of the relational model. From SQL we have somehow got the idea that relational databases can only store a very limited set of types (various variations on character and numeric in principle) but this is merely a restriction of SQL and not of the relational model itself.

The hierarchical nature of XML leads you into all sorts of trouble (and procedural code) as soon as you need to represent many to many relationships for example. Now documents may look hierarchical, but in terms of their data structures they certainly are not. Think about the relationship between pages and paragraphs for example, or between index items and pages. With the relational model many to many relationships can be expressed properly and queried easily without resort to procedural code.

It is a fundamental principle of the relational model that the logical representation is firmly divided from the physical representation (SQL fails badly on this score too).

Posted by: jorwell   Posted on: 06/02/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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