> -----Original Message----- > From: Kimbro Staken [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> This is really a question about how the server is being used > today or more > likely how it would be used if it did X, Y and Z. What kind of > applications are people building? What kind do you want to be > building? > I am currently developing a web-based application that manages contacts for users and groups of users. My data is most naturally represented using XML documents: It would really complicate things if I had to map to a relational DB. In most cases, all of the documents within a collection have the same structure. For my current application, schema validation is not absolutely required. I have only one application that populates/reads the DB, and I can code/debug that application to ensure that only valid documents are stored. However, I could see using this technology for more projects in which a single database serves many different applications, and in this case it would strongly desirable to insulate applications from the "mistakes" of other applications. Once an application is completed, it generally expects that its database will be populated with good data. If new applications are being developed that are not quite debugged yet, they could easily introduce bad data that might break existing applications. Allowing schema-based validation to be supported in the DB server would go a long way to address these problems. I do consulting for many different clients, many of whom are working on web applications backed by shared data. While it is true that a large percentage of these clients require their data to be stored in their enterprise relational DB (usually Oracle), there as at least a significant minority of clients that would be amenable to using alternate technologies such as XML databases. The ability to validate at the DB server level would make it significantly easier to sell this technology to a lot of the clients I work with. For what it's worth, I would only support the idea of schema-based validation if certain conditions were met: 1) Validation should not be a requirement. For apps not needing validation, they should be able to avoid it 2) For apps that do not require validation, there should be little or no overhead introduced by native support for validation 3) Schemas should be in some way assignable to an entire collection, so that all documents within the collection can be validated against a single schema. Making them assignable to individual documents is fine, but would not be a requirement for my needs - Tim
