[Biodevelopers] RDBMS and Bioinformatics

Malay mbasu at mail.nih.gov
Tue Mar 16 13:13:44 EST 2004


> I think some types of data are better represented by XML.  For example,
> hierarchical data.  Also, document-oriented data is better stored as XML.
> For example, a scientific article that has been marked up with useful
> information.  Storing and indexing something like "<Author>John
> Doe</Author> used a <ScientificTechnique>microarray</ScientificTechnique>
> to do blah" would be very complicated in a relational database.
> 

XML is very good for anydata that will be parsed using software. That's 
why is is most of the time an intermediate format. But XML can't be or 
should not be used anything but very simplistic obeject modellling for 
relational databases.

Malay



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