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XML is everywhere
With the proliferation of XML-based applications, XML has raised expectations of how information can be leveraged to increase productivity and efficiency. Whether in Publishing, Aerospace, Financial Services, Life Sciences or Health Care, XML has become a standard technology for more and more industries and is used in virtually all industries and in a wide variety of document-centric applications to optimize document management:
Publishing
Editorial content management
Online archiving
Digital asset management
Ad management
Content syndication
Aerospace
Production of technical documentation
Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETM)
Knowledge management
Financial Services
Data exchange
Web content management
Standardized business reporting processes
Business process management
Life Sciences
E-Learning
Knowledge management
Health Care
Online archiving
Knowledge management
XML challenges
As organizations embrace XML and the concept of "write content once, re-use at will", IT professionals empowered to deliver the next generation of XML applications have come to realize that traditional database models are ill-suited for storing, indexing and retrieving rich XML content:
Content is no longer of a purely transactional nature, nor is it purely multimedia, or solely textual, but rather a hybrid of the three forms of content.
Existing relational databases, which were conceived to support data-centric applications, are not suited to managing the kind of XML content that document management applications must handle. XML content is of unpredictable, semi-structured nature and subject to change at any point. Databases must adapt to support such content. XML, by its very nature, presents many challenges to the traditional RDBMS model. It offers the ability to create deeply hierarchical, multi-tiered structures that enable nested values that vary in length and type. It is important to be able to manage, in a streamlined way, a structure that contains empty or missing elements and whose ordering is important.
XML content does not map well to existing object-oriented and relational database models.
Storing an XML document in a traditional database requires that the XML structure be mapped to a predefined database schema, thereby requiring the decomposition of the XML document in order to explode it into a series of inter-related tables. This process is often resource intensive and results in the loss of some data such as processing instructions and comments as well as the notion of element and attribute ordering ? making the XML document hierarchy irrelevant. Why bother creating XML content if you are just going to destroy it upon its storage? In addition, if your XML Schema changes even slightly, your database structure will be disrupted, prompting often massive updates to be required to hundreds of tables.
Native XML Storage is Key
TEXTML Server is a native XML content server, with three main advantages over most traditional databases which may have been ?XML-enabled?:
The XML document is the basic unit of storage.
When an XML document is inserted into TEXTML Server, it is preserved as a separate, unique object without any modification. Element and attribute ordering is preserved; the original document, including processing instructions, comments, etc., is completely preserved. When the document is retrieved it is 100% intact.
TEXTML Server uses the markup in XML to design and build its indexes. The result is a streamlined repository structure that gives rise to superior content search and retrieval performances.
TEXTML Server is DTD and Schema independent.
In fact, TEXTML Server is designed specifically to manage XML collections that are heterogeneous in structure. In other words, TEXTML Server can easily manage XML that comes from multiple schemas or DTDs. Any well-formed XML document can be stored and queried in TEXTML Server. No Schema or DTD is required, making mapping of the XML structure to a predetermined database structure and all the limitations associated with that procedure unnecessary.
TEXTML Server uses an XML-specific query language.
TEXTML Server?s query language is designed specifically to query the hierarchical nature of XML documents. It enables extremely fast retrieval of content and can search any element or attribute of XML documents even if they come from different Schemas/DTDs.
One XML Back-End Server for Various Solutions
TEXTML Server is a back-end server designed to store, index and retrieve information contained in large repositories.
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