hubert depesz lubaczewski wrote:
> i have number of projects coming to my mind which could take advantage
> of something like this. the simplest thing is e-commerce site, where all
> custom fields (fields dependand on product type) can be stored in one,
> easily retrievable, field - thus reducing database load by skipping
> additional table scans for custom field table(s).
<slightly_offtopic>
I attended a talk on DB'2 XML Viper stuff the other day. And they were
touting its high performance XML/XQuery support for stuff like this
(their favorite example seems to be meeting appointments). Essentially
they were saying a lot of things simply do not fit a fixed storage
layout, but there are enough similarities between data sets that you can
still benefit from indexing things.
However their stuff also supports nested structures due to their XML
nature. Also due to the XML nature you can optionally check all data
going in to follow an xsd to prevent people from going all too crazy.
</slightly_offtopic>
regards,
Lukas