Oracle8i Application Developer's Guide - XML Release 3 (8.1.7) Part Number A86030-01 |
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Introduction to Oracle XML, 20 of 27
If the XML document has a well-defined structure and contains data that is updateable or used in other ways, the document is data-centric. Typically, the XML document contains elements or attributes that have complex structures.
Examples of this kind of document include sales orders and invoices, airline flight schedules, and so on.
Oracle8i, with its object-relational extensions has the ability to capture the structure of the data in the database using object types, object references, and collections. There are two options for storing and preserving the structure of the XML data in an object-relational form:
Once stored in the object-relational form, the data can be easily updated, queried, rearranged, and reformatted as needed using SQL.
XML-SQL Utility (XSU) provides the means to then store an XML document by mapping it to the underlying object-relational storage, and conversely, provides the ability retrieve the object-relational data as an XML document.
If an XML document is structured, but the structure of the XML document is not compatible with the structure of the underlying database schema, you must transform the data into the correct format before writing it to the database. You can achieve this in one of the following ways:
Finally, if you have a combination of structured and unstructured XML data, but still want to view and operate on it as a whole, you can use Oracle8i views.
Views enable you to construct an object on the "fly" by combining XML data stored in a variety of ways. You can do the following:
When you need to retrieve the data as a whole, simply construct the structure from the various pieces of data with the use of type constructors in the view's select statement. XML-SQL Utility then enables retrieving the constructed data from the view as a single XML document.
To generate a web form's infrastructure, you can do the following:
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