When technophiles enthuse about XML the rest of the world’s eyes glaze over. “Another three letter acronym”, they cry, “Run away!”.
But its a wonderful thing for anyone who deals with storage, transfer, exchange, discovery, processing, and/or analysis of information in machine readable form.
If you follow the links, or just “Google” yourself to the wealth of information and tutorials about XML and related technologies, chances are you’ll come away with that “gotta have it” feeling.
Good News: Oracle Does XML
Oracle has an XML Data Type which is a system-defined opaque type for handling XML data
XMLType has predefined member functions on it to extract XML nodes and fragments.
You can create columns of XMLType data.
You can also generate XML documents as instances dynamically.
These features, as well as APIs for the DOM
and SAX models are available through pl/sql
There’s More:
The XML DB Repository
(May require an registration password, but registration is free)
The repository allows you to store and retrieve XML documents from the Oracle database as if the database were a file system.
You can even set up a windows “Web Folder” to drop and drags documents between your desktop and the database, or to allow third party tools to load and store XML documents stored inside the database, as if they were in you local (or mapped) file folders.
The repository can also be manipulated through SQL and PL/SQL.
Oh. and did we mention that you can arrange for full text search over the XML documents, query the XML documents AS IF they were relational so that they can be joined with other, existing relational tables, use the XQuery language to query and transform your XML documents, and that you can extract or update node sets from the document using XPATH expressions through functions available in SQL and PL/SQL?
The technical manuals available through tahiti.oracle.com are an exiting read.
