Locians, I found an announcement for the dbXML project at Freshmeat. This appears to be what we were discussing a short while ago: If we're using all XML for our data, why not use an XML-based database? Well, we weren't aware of any at the time. Here's the announcement (Justin, is this guy related to you?): dbXML project now online Tom Bradford - July 22nd 1999, 04:55 EST The dbXML project is a development effort with the ultimate goal of producing a high-performance client/server DBMS for XML-based structured documents. Overall, the theory is that you could speed up database retrieval incredibly if you did not have to join tables constantly to retrieve structured data. So many programs are written to import and export tabular query results to and from XML that it seems like somewhat of a useless step. Why not just store entire structured documents as single entities and retrieve whole or partial documents with simple SQL queries? This is the goal of the dbXML project. The project is only a little more than one week old and is actively looking for talented volunteer contributors. http://www.dbxml.org They are looking for help. Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone here. :-) Jeff -- +------------------------------------+ | | | J.W. Bizzaro | | jeff at bioinformatics.org | | | | THE OPEN COLLABORATORY | | FOR MOLECULAR BIOINFORMATICS | | | | http://bioinformatics.org/ | | | +------------------------------------+