Re: is GiST still alive?

Christopher Browne wrote:

>But I think back to the XML generator I wrote for GnuCash; it has the
>notion of building up a hierarchy of entities and attributes, each of
>which is visible as an identifyable object of some sort. Mapping that
>onto a set of PostgreSQL relations wouldn't work terribly well.
>
>

*nod* I have tried this several times - it just doesn't work well,
because the maps are too different.

You could do something like this:
. a table for each element type, fields being the attributes, plus
the node id.
. a table to tie everything together (parent_id, child_id,
child_order, child_type).
In theory you could even generate the DB schema from an XML schema and
evaluate it with XPath-like expressions.

But why put yourself to such bother? I have never found a good reason to
do this sort of thing.

cheers

andrew