XML Features of Oracle 8i and 9i
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.
Databases store data, XML is not a storage mechanism, it is a storage format (amongst its many capabilities).
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:
- XML is easy to convert further into different formats as required: e.g HTML, PDF, and plain text. This gives a flexibility to web applications where data can be searched for and accessed from the database, and then formatted for output in different formats using e.g XSL.
XML seperates data from formatting (and programming logic). XSL is now broken down into two parts; XSLT