[hfdb] SQL db and XML

[Zenaan Harkness]

Till and James (and everyone reading), I seek your comments on these
assertions/ thoughts:

* I would be very surprised if it is not close to trivial to generate
XML output from an SQL database.

* Any flat file format is easy to version control.

* We should be version controlling our data.

* It would be nice for our team to be able to enter data into flat (XML)
files.

* XML files can be easily imported into an SQL database.

* We will get higher quality reports from an SQL db than from a "bunch
of XML files" (unless we first import those files into a RDBMS).

* Whether we use an SQL db or XML files for storage, we will be defining
"fields", "types", etc.

* Without an XML schema to validate XML data or 'content' files against,
at some point down the line we will have to reconcile what should be
indentical field entries in different records, but are actually
different/ unique entries due to spelling and even perhaps even ordering
differences (eg. Matrox Millenium vs Millenium, Matrox - although
perhaps spelling will be our only issue?).

* An XML schema and an SQL schema serve a similar purpose (at least for
us).

* We don't need an XML schema to start creating "device entries" as XML
files.

* If we start creating XML files, we will pretty quickly need to start
discussing what field names to use, etc;
and this is essentially the same as defining an implicit schema, or a
normalized SQL db table structure.


QUESTION:
* Does anyone here know much about XML processing yet?


I'll try to find out about Postgres and importing XML files this week.

TIA
Zenaan