Chapter 8: Understanding XML Documents as Objects

Overview

This book has examined XML, XSL, relational tables, and even specifics in both the Oracle and SQL Server relational databases. You should already know that XML documents are generally hierarchically structured, but they can be flat-structured as well. However, a hierarchical structure is most often appropriate to XML data and it can give better access and structure to data.

Therefore, because the object data model is hierarchical in nature, it makes perfect sense to attempt to describe XML document structure as being similar to object data model structure. And thus this chapter attempts to very briefly describe what exactly the object data model is.

In this chapter you learn about:

• The object data model

• The relational data model in comparison to the object data model

• How the object data model can help to support the most effective structure for XML data

• A flat-structured XML document

• A hierarchically structured XML document

• The differences between using flat and hierarchical structure for XML