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

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

thx Thomas, all good thinking

in the meantime I am going to do a proof of concept using sql extension and
xquery

J


On 31 March 2010 09:19, Thomas White <tho...@gm...> wrote:

> James,
>
> I like your idea - it lowers the resistance about moving away from the
> existing investments of time, code and money in the existing RDBMS.
>
> As always the first thing first - we need to name what we are doing. I
> propose the working name "*XML gateway to RDBMS*". When we refer to this
> functionality we can say *"eXist is a XML gateway to existing RDBMS".*This sounds as a reasonable USP (Unique Selling Proposition) as well.
>
> Let us explore the idea further:
> Step 1. Mount a RDBMS as a collection. We may need to use a special prefix
> to the mounterd name.
> Step 2. Provide means for enumerating the existing db resources:
>
>    - Enumerate all tables and views.
>    - Get the metadata for each table in two formats: a) as XML document,
>    b) as a schema document. We can use this to generate XQuery for quering
>    data.
>    - A function that returns data from a table receiving the name of the
>    table, a list of field names and number of records. This will allow the
>    newbies coming from RDBMS world to start using eXist right out of the box
>    before they become familiar with XQuery.
>
> Step 3. We can even provide a web front end that will allow developers with
> no XQuery experience to select the tables and fields they need and then
> generate and save an XQuery for extracting the data they need, giving them
> an URI that returns the data. This could be very attractive functionality.
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Thomas
>
>
> ------
>
> Thomas White
>
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>
>
> On 31 March 2010 06:45, James Fuller <jam...@ex...> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >
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