One of the advantages of being a old git is that you can see history repeating itself. First relational vs hierarchial, then objects appeared and we fought the relational vs object (usually hierarchial) wars, and now with XML we do the same dance again.
The original rationale behind relational databases still hold true and I recommend Date as a good read. Most of the stuff in his books seems like common sense, but it wasn't so obvious at the time. It just goes to show how deeply relational thinking is embeded in the way we do things.
Relational databases will win again, after all the data is the thing between the angle brackets. No doubt there will be some applications where XML specific atabases are the go but in general relational dbs will be modified until the XML functionality required is available.
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One of the advantages of being a old git is that you can see history repeating itself. First relational vs hierarchial, then objects appeared and we fought the relational vs object (usually hierarchial) wars, and now with XML we do the same dance again. The original rationale behind relational databases still hold true and I recommend Date as a good read. Most of the stuff in his books seems like common sense, but it wasn't so obvious at the time. It just goes to show how deeply relational thinking is embeded in the way we do things. Relational databases will win again, after all the data is the thing between the angle brackets. No doubt there will be some applications where XML specific atabases are the go but in general relational dbs will be modified until the XML functionality required is available.