Re: is GiST still alive?

josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com (Josh Berkus) writes:
> Gregor,
>> I'm developing a native XML database (C++) (which is supposed to become
>> open source one day) and I'm wondering wheather I could use GiST for it's
>> indexes. Is GiST still alive?
>
> Don't know, sorry.
>
>> Would PostgreSQL fit that requirement? And are you interested in having a
>> fast, scalable XML access method?
>
> We would welcome good XML tools for XML stored in databases.
>
> However, I'm not sure that PostgreSQL is the appropriate platform for an
> all-XML database; we're pretty dogmatically a relational database ... perhaps
> the grandfather of most relational databases.

It leaves open the question of what is the appropriate way of
expressing XML entities and attributes and CDATA in database form.

If the point of the exercise is to have some way of storing XML data
in a database, then you may readily declare it thus:

create table some_table (
-- key columns omitted
xml character varying,
-- additional columns omitted
);

And that's perfectly good at storing XML information.

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.
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Christopher Browne
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