Today I listened to a pitch from one of our team members. The topic was the technologies available to deal with input files we will be getting in XML format. One of the recommended approaches was to use XML DB.To tell you the truth, I knew little to nothing about XML DB. Apparently it is a part of the Oracle database. It is supposed to allow native XML processing. Oracle says it is a high performance solution. They give you different options to store the XML within the database. Some options have better performance than others.
Once the XML is stored in a repository within the database, you can get to it using languages such as Java, PL/SQL and C. You access it via the DOM API. There is also a new XMLType. You can use this type in table columns or PL/SQL variables. Currently one of our DBAs cautioned us that it might be slow to put big files of XML data in the database. We are going to do a proof of concept to see what kind of performance we will encounter.
