Hour19.Using XML with Databases

Hour 19. Using XML with Databases

Good data modeling is as important as it ever was, XML or no.

Thomas B. Passin

Although XML is certainly a great storage format for shuttling data around the Web, most web applications store their data in relational databases. Knowing this, it stands to reason that many web applications will end up accessing data from a database yet interacting with it and sharing it with other applications as XML data. This has a lot do with the fact that XML can be used not only as a document format, but also as a way to represent data in a highly structured manner. In this hour, you learn how relational databases work and how you can integrate your XML applications with relational databases. More specifically, you find out how to export database data as XML code, as well as how to make SQL queries on a database and format the results in XML. In this hour you'll learn

• The basic theory behind the relational database model

• How to use SQL, the query language for relational databases

• How to export data from a database as XML

• How to write a program that queries a database and formats the results as XML