NYCPHP Meetup

[Ben Sgro (ProjectSkyLine)]

Hello,

Is the audio available for the slides?

- Ben

Ben Sgro, President
ProjectSkyLine - Defining New Horizons
+1 718.487.9368 (N.Y. Office)

Our company: www.projectskyline.com
Our products: www.project-contact.com

This e-mail is confidential information intended only for the use of the 
individual to whom it is addressed.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian D." <brian at realm3.com>
To: "NYPHP Talk" <talk at lists.nyphp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] Some comments on the XML Talk


>> Second, there were ideas that came out during Q & A that might be
>> expanded on to good purpose.  Things that we might not know or take for
>> granted, like the philosophy regarding types and structures. The
>> audience seemed to be focusing on the need for structure, while the tool
>> did not seem to want to do that.
>
> That made me wonder if most people completely missed the point. The
> application of XML databases is, I think, in situations where
> structure is either not applicable or not possible. Trying to stamp a
> structure on an XML database (from what I can gather) destroys one of
> the primary reasons for employing the technology. XML is flexible.
> That's what makes it different. If you shoehorn an XML database into
> what Rusty called a "rectangular" format, why not just continue using
> relational databases?
>
> As far as uses go, I was nodding the entire time that Rusty was
> talking about the usefulness of structure-free systems in the medical
> industry. I've worked in the medical industry almost exclusively for
> seven years and there have been several times that I have had to force
> data (documents, specifically) into relational formats that obviously
> didn't work well. As Rusty pointed out, it makes a developer feel
> dirty. I've seen "documents" tables with over two hundred columns, and
> it took all sorts of work-arounds to fix the performance problems that
> it caused. I've also seen the EAV format that Ali M. mentions in his
> email. None of these solutions seem to fit the problem very well.
>
> Rusty's presentation interested me because it seems to hold the best
> answer I've seen yet to the free-flowing/constantly-changing data that
> medical software has to deal with. I still don't feel that the (open
> source, anyway) XML databases are a *mature* solution, but they
> certainly hold a lot of promise for an industry afflicted with poor
> containers to hold our data. The hybrid solutions hold the most
> possibility, I think, because it meets the need for both structural
> and non-structural data. I will be watching the maturation of the
> available software with much more attention than I have before.
>
> - Brian Dailey
>
>
> realm3 web applications [realm3.com]
> freelance consulting, application development
> (423) 506-0349
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