[Biodevelopers] RDBMS and Bioinformatics

Dan Bolser dmb at mrc-dunn.cam.ac.uk
Tue Mar 16 17:46:57 EST 2004


On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Malay wrote:

> 
> > 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.

I heard about UML for such things. I don't know much about object
modeling, but I have also read it isn't incompatible with RDB. I guess I
should find out more about object databases (don't these run on XML?).

Also I guess I should learn more about XML schema.

Thanks,
Dan.


> 
> Malay
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