By Jack Vaughan, Application Development Trends

XML has clear benefits as a lingua franca for integration, but it must co-exist with a well-established body of relational DB know-how. More than a few architects are concerned that they will soon have to throw a slew of finely tuned relational queries out the window and start over. JNetDirect recently unveiled software to address RDB-to-XML data mapping. JSQLMapper is a bidirectional data-mapping tool that cuts requirements for custom coding to bring relational data into XML format. With JSQLMapper, developers can create data mappings from existing relational data stores to XML documents.

http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9092

See also XML and Databases: http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlAndDatabases.html

Why on earth does XML's emergence somehow imply dumping existing investement in relational database queries?

XML provides an alternative, uniform, and widely adopted mechanism for exploiting existing relational data. The emergence of the recent SQL/XML (SQLX) standard should at least bring this into clearer perspective.

Obviously the lack of practical SQLX tutorial material may be the source of some of the confusion about this subject matter, so here are a few urls:

Generating RSS from SQL Data - http://www.openlinksw.com/articles/rssvirtsqlx.htm(this is one of many ways that this can be achieved using OpenLink Virtuoso).

SQLX Tutorials and online demos -
http://demo.openlinksw.com:8890/tutorial/xml/index.vsp?f=1