XML Features of Oracle 8i and 9i
May 20, 2003[From WebReference.com]
XML and relational databases are both technologies for structuring, cataloguing and processing data. If data has a regular and atomic structure, it is more appropriate and efficient to use a database than XML. In this case, why would you wish to go to the trouble of converting such data from a database into XML and vice versa? Reasons include:
On the other hand text documents, which are usually irregularly structured, cannot be effectively stored in a relational database. In this case, you can only store them in the database as BLOBs, which cannot be searched or processed in the normal way. However, there are cases where this is still desirable: very large repositories of pre-existing XML/SGML documents. The database can be used for cataloguing and searching, and documents once extracted can be processed further using XSL/XSLT.
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