Re: Native XML

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> There seems to be an almost universal assumption that storing XML in its
> native form (i.e. a text stream) is going to produce inefficient results.
> Maybe it will, but I think it needs to be fairly convincingly demonstrated.
> And then we would have to consider the costs. For example, unless we
> implemented our own XPath processor to work with our own XML format (do we
> really want to do that?), to evaluate an XPath expression for a piece of XML
> we'd actually need to produce the text format from our internal format
> before passing it to some external library to parse into its internal format
> and then process the XPath expression. That means we'd actually be making
> things worse, not better. But this is clearly the sort of processing people
> want to do - see today's discussion upthread about xpath_table.

Well, obviously the only point of having our own internal format is if
we have our own xpath processor &c to match. One would think that
this would be a lot faster than parsing the string with libxml2 every
time we want to xpath it, especially for large documents. But then
again, I haven't seen any benchmarks.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company