Relational Model versus XML
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I would agree with the views that (pending further investigation) the website data should probably be first modelled relationally based on the given entities, then augmented with XML structures.
A College website I worked on used relational tables which are (I believe) generally more efficient at many-to-many relationships (many events to many audiences, many images to many news items: that is, images reused from a digital media asset database) using intermediate tables. We did use XML as well, for the XHTML content of articles, and all of our course information was extracted (from relational tables and XML sources) and stored on the website as an XML document, then rendered to web pages.
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Sean Pearce (1/24/2013)
Terrible question. To have to make such a fundamental architecture decision with a one sentence spec means this project will be doomed from the start.Which is why you don't make the decision based on that one sentence - therefore 'either' is the correct answer.
Also the explanation mentions the need for a platform independant solution (did Joe write that passage). Personally I don't give two hoots if my solution doesn't work on Oracle or MySQL. If you bring me in to design a SQL Server solution, that's exactly what you will get.
You don't know whether platform independence is important before finding out more about the requirements. The explanation doesn't say there's a need for platform independence, just that it's something to consider.
It's not a terrible question, the whole idea of these QOTDs is to make you think, provoke discussion and perhaps prompt you to research areas that otherwise you may not consider - isn't it? Personally I don't give two hoots if I get the answer right or not - as long as I learn something useful.
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Sean Pearce (1/25/2013)
sipas (1/25/2013)Personally I don't give two hoots if I get the answer right or not - as long as I learn something useful.
I agree with that sentiment, however I learned nothing from this question.
I'm probably less experienced than a lot of people on this forum, so maybe this question was more useful for people like me who've still got a lot to learn.:blush:
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Thanks for the question. Wasn't quite sure of what to pick. I agree with most of the comments.
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Koen Verbeeck (1/23/2013)
I'd like to see the performance of the XML solution.Also, I would think the structure of your website is known, so a relational model is preferred.
Curious to see the debate that will follow 🙂
Exactly.... according to the reference
If your data is highly structured with known schema, the relational model is likely to work best for data storage
And the details were given in the question so it is reasonable to assume it is known.
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Sean Pearce (1/25/2013)
sipas (1/25/2013)Personally I don't give two hoots if I get the answer right or not - as long as I learn something useful.
I agree with that sentiment, however I learned nothing from this question.
I second that.
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sipas (1/25/2013)
Which is why you don't make the decision based on that one sentence - therefore 'either' is the correct answer.
There is not enough information to know if either model would be appropriate, let alone both! Without any supporting information, the last answer isn't any more correct than the first two.
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Sean Pearce (1/24/2013)
To add, I chose relational and I will stick to that.But what, then, will you use for an RDBMS? I'm not aware of any that conforms to the relational model. :crying:
Tom
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Read the question and then reread the question. I looked for the answer of "it depends" and found none. Then I thought about what would work and reread again and then got it right.
I have to admit that this question did not cause me to learn anything but such is life.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
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Koen Verbeeck (1/23/2013)
I'd like to see the performance of the XML solution.Also, I would think the structure of your website is known, so a relational model is preferred.
Curious to see the debate that will follow 🙂
I have no experience of using native XML databases with data capture from websites, but if XML is used to provide part of the read-only web content in a file-based early-rendering model, it can be exceptionally fast. We populated our College course web pages from a static 3 megabyte XML document with XSLT using ASP.NET's XslCompiledTransform, and rendering times were basically too fast to measure (served from our least-powerful production server in 2006, I recall) compared with serving static pages.
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Absolutely no idea about the question. Just guessed it right. 🙂
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I guessed relational and got it wrong, based on the known unknowns such as performance and scalability factors.
+1
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Koen Verbeeck (1/23/2013)
I'd like to see the performance of the XML solution.Also, I would think the structure of your website is known, so a relational model is preferred.
Curious to see the debate that will follow 🙂
+1
I don't like questions like "it depends".
Without concrete and detailed information a proper solution could not be obtained.
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BrainDonor (1/24/2013)
The true answer should be "Either is a candidate at this point, due to insufficient information".That goes along with my thoughts. An answer of 'Either may be appropriate' rather than 'Either is appropriate' would be better, IMO.
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