Mark Wilson I am the creator of TopXML. I am available for international and local (Australia) contracts. I am a Solution Architect/Business Analyst. I have worked in IT in several countries (NZ, Australia, South Africa, UK) building and training teams for government and very large non-governmental organizations. I am ex-Microsoft Consulting Services. I wrote the first book on Microsoft XML published in 2000 called XML Programming with VB and ASP. Most recently I have been building tools for the SEO industry. Ask me for a 37 point SEO health-checkup for your website.
An excerpt from WROX Press
Professional XML Databases by Kevin Williams, Michael Brundage,
Patrick Dengler, Jeff Gabriel, Andy Hoskinson, Michael Kay, Thomas
Maxwell, Marcelo Ochoa, Johnny Papa, Mohan Vanmane
In this chapter, we will examine some approaches for taking an
existing relational database and moving it to XML.
With much of our business data stored in relational databases, there
are going to be a number of reasons why we might want to expose that
data as XML:
Sharing business data with other systems.
Interoperability with incompatible systems.
Exposing legacy data to applications that use XML.
Business-to-business transactions.
Object persistence using XML.
Content syndication.
Relational databases are a mature technology, which, as they have
evolved, have enabled users to model complex relationships between data
that they need to store. In this chapter, we will see how to model some
of the complex data structures that are stored in relational databases
in XML documents.
To do this, we will be looking at some database structures, and then
creating content models using XML DTDs. We will also show some sample
content for the data in XML to illustrate this. In the process, we will
come up with a set of guidelines that will prove helpful when creating
XML models for relational data.
Note that there are some mechanisms out there already that provide a
"default" way to derive XML from existing relational database
structures. ADO 2.5 will return a "flattened" recordset in an XML
representation, while SQL Server 2000 provides direct extraction of
joined structures as XML. However, these technologies are still
maturing, and can't handle more complex situations, like many-to-many
relationships, that must be represented by IDREF-ID pointers. In this
chapter, we'll see how structures can be handcrafted to properly
represent these types of relationships. We will tune our structures to
maximize performance, and minimize document size.
