Monthly Archives: October 2008

Querying XML Documents, Revisiting Existing Languages and Methodologies

XMLThese days in the web 2.0 era, we are using XML extensively. We use xml on our browser, to represent the hypertext. We use xml in our most recent MS Word documents. We use XML in web services. We use XML in our AJAX applications. To the bigger scale, the enterprise, we also use XML in the service oriented architecture implementation.We fall onto XML as our first choice for universal data format. And also databases?

As a plain text data representation, XML should incur extra overhead for the size and processing time. Indexing XML documents is also another issue, not to mention providing relational data on top of XML documents. Building pure XML database is non-trivial, hence we hardly find implementation for such. However, given all the disadvantages of utilizing XML as the database, is it still possible to do basic database functionality for XML documents?

Fortunately, the answer is yes.

I provide a paper containing my survey to existing approaches to querying XML documents and achieving database functionality over XML documents. Although the structure of the paper may be inclined to academic domain, i think it will still be useful for developer who is looking for quick hindsight for such matter.

You can download the paper from the link below:

XML Query Processing and Query Languages: A Survey (2204 downloads )

How Deep Will The Global Economy In Turmoil Bring Impact To IT Sector?

Stock falling deeply - photo by ReutersLast week was a global disaster for stock market. As you might have seen in the news broadcast, it was totally red for worldwide stock markets. Not only Wallstreet, European and Asian indexes also plunged deeply until the final day of transaction last weekend. Only gloom and fear (and maybe some tantrum and mutter) occupied the trade floor.

Nobody can assure when the trend will turn around to the positive track and stock markets make their comeback. Although the stocks have showed the rebound today, I’ll stay skeptical and be very prudent to say it’s the end of the negative slope.

One thing for sure, continuous stock decline brings harm to the industries. It’s easily explainable that falling stock price is associated with less bright future of a company and it makes sense that investors are unlikely to invest the capital in a business that gives nothing in return. However, the fallacy of a single company in many cases will only bring impact to a smaller scale. When the decline is massive and global, the issue will be shifted to the impact to national economy and when it involves the big-giant nations, turbulence in their economies will also affect world’s future economy prospect. It’s pretty understandable to see how this issue has forced global leaders to march up and set up the paces, reinforce together and discuss viable solution to this crisis. Continue reading