[Exist-development] thoughts about next steps with RDBMS integration

[James F. <jam...@ex...>]

whilst doing xproc development, I have had great fun integrating some of
eXist existing extension functionality as extension steps ... a thought
occurred to me about the current state of integration with RDBMS.

Currently we have the nice SQL extension module (written by Adam Retter)
which uses JDBC to query a relational database ... this means we can easily
query an RDBMS through xquery using SQL statements. I think this module
enables a lot of scenarios but misses off the primary scenario for the
masses of people out there with data currently existing in RDBMS but want to
use XML database.

Take the following imaginary developer scenario:

'I have an existing RDBMS and I want to use XML database ... I am worried
about going 'all xml' because RDBMS has served me well, not to mention I
have a lot of code hanging off the existing database ... if I migrate to an
XML database I will have to migrate all those other bits ... this is too
hard and too much change to attempt in one risky step. I would like to
install eXist and provide in some registry a connection string which
effectively 'mounts' the RDBMS as a collection ... from which here on out I
can use pure xquery to work on. For now a read only view of the data is all
I need but someday I would like to be able to do updates as well on the
RDBMS data. Lastly I should be able to configure cache characteristics if
the database connection is intermittent'

Thoughts ? Does anyone see this scenario as something that needs to be
addressed ?

James Fuller