[Koha-devel] Using a Native XML Database with Koha

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

2009/6/2 Walls, Ian <Ian.Walls at med.nyu.edu>:
> So, the thought occurred to me: since most of these formats are already in
> XML (or could be mapped to it easily enough), why not use a Native XML
> Database?  This would save on mappings, since XQuery would be used to
> extract information directly from the XML.  It would also be flexible enough
> to allow for home-grown Schemas to be mixed in with standards.  There would
> also be one less translation in getting the information out of storage and
> into an AJAX interface.

I agree that having more XML functionality in the DBMS would be handy.
 Of course, only bibliographic and authority metadata currently
require the use of XML, and there's a lot of transactional processing
(circulation, acquisitions, etc.) that benefits from the traditional
relational structure, so I wouldn't recommend moving the entire schema
to a native XML database.

MySQL 5.1 goes part of the way by adding the ExtractValue() and
UpdateXML() functions to do queries and updates on an XML blob using a
subset of XPath, but there's no schema support.  However, as long as
it doesn't perform too badly, adding multi-metadata support may be
enough to justify upgrading to MySQL 5.1, although I notice that 5.1
is still only in Debian experimental.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
VP, Research & Development, LibLime
galen.charlton at liblime.com
p: 1-888-564-2457 x709
skype: gmcharlt