Re: Allow backend to output result sets in XML

Greg Stark wrote:
> Personally I don't see any point in xml, but if there was a standard
query
> protocol then a client could send queries to any database that
supported
> it
> without using any libraries. That might be useful. Of course you could
do
> that
> without xml, but people seem to get more excited about complying with
> standards when they invoke xml.

hm. I have to deal with xml quite frequently because I do a lot of DX
with the gov't and other entities that are rapidly standardizing on xml.

I like Oracle's approach to xml using object relational mappings to
allow composition of documents server side based on natural data
relationships. The XML document becomes something like a specialized
view. It would save me tons of app-level coding if the server could do
this for me.

Since postgres is already fairly Oracle-ish in design, IMO this is
definitely the way to go (XQuery = Insanity.). A FE/BE protocol
revision would be useful but not necessary...the XML doc could be
returned as a scalar.

Right now I think all xml processing is done in app-level code, because
the server (due to limitations of sql) is usually unable to return data
the way you want it...so simply adding xml output from psql would be
fairly useless for most real tasks (if it wasn't, someone would have
done it a long time ago). Also, contrib\xml can already handle most of
the simple things.

Merlin