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  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] XML vrs relational
  • Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 09:55:56 -0600

Richard Morris writes:
> Theres a nice discussion on slashdot about the advantages and
> disadvantages of relational and object (XML) databases.
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/10/2043202
>
> The first comment:
>
> > The thing the XML databases are nice for is if folks can't really
> lock down the schema.

Also for comic relief note child of parent post:

Proverb (Score:4, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 12, @10:25PM (#11923876)

I once had a problem.
I thought: "Oh, I know: I'll just use XML!"

Now I had two problems.

I recommend reading all of the 4+ rated comments. Lots of good stuff
and still a very controversial topic. IMO, I don't think that XML is
exclusive to object or relational databases, but rather a bridge
mechanism between the two.

> Seems to sum it up for me.
>
> Can we lock down the schema, do we want to? By this I mean do we want a
> fixed set of fields for tha plant data. If we do this it kind of locks
> down the database and the type of info which people can add, creating an
> inflexiable system.

No, I don't think it is really a good idea to stop being open to ideas
about what sorts of information is important to have about plants and
other elements in the database. Nor do I think that the current
schema is optimal and it has a way to go before being "fully
normalized". I do see a point where the schema matures in the sense
that we really don't change it much, but at this point I don't think
what we have still needs a lot of work.

> When new data such as the tanplants data comes along it could be a big
> job to adapt a relational model to fit.
>
> Apoligies for revisiting old ground.
>
> Rich
>
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--
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'




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