Hugh,
I happen to work for a company for which this technology is quite important
--- a database company ;^)
It is my (and our) experience that there is no one right way to "shred"
hierarchical tree-structured, semi-structured data such as that represented
in XML into inherently regular rectangular structures such as SQL's tables.
Instead, there are practically an infinite number of ways. Indeed, for any
given XML structure definition (e.g., DTD, Schema), there are potentially
dozens (or more!) ways of performing the conversion. It is my belief
(perhaps, or perhaps not, shared by my employer) that the best we'll ever
be able to do is use some heuristics to suggest a shredding (or mapping or
conversion) based on a particular DTD or Schema, then allow the application
author make changes necessitated by the application's requirements.
Reasonable people may differ and think that there's some "obvious" way to
do it, possibly "reducto ad extremum" in nature, but I question how useful
such an approach will be to most users.
Sorry!
Jim
At 10:39 2003-03-26 +1100 Wednesday, Hugh Dixon wrote:
Re "Converting a hierarchical to a pseudo relational xml format" (XSL
list, 3/22/2003).
Thanks for the mention!!
Actually I'd appreciate any suggestion/ideas/thoughts about how to go
about this, as I currently cannot see aeven an initial algorithm.
Thx
Hugh Dixon
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