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Someday (and that day may never come) database companies may agree to a common
primary data format. Presently, however, most information
is stored in a variety of
proprietary database formats. RDBMs (relational database management systems) are
excellent for data storage and retrieval; however, sharing the information they contain
remains a problem. Most organizations are quickly recognizing the tremendous need to
make the information contained in their internal databases accessible via the Web.
Various
reasons exist for doing so, including better communication between employees,
roving executives who need information for their meetings,
and the movement toward e-
commerce. The idea is that you don’t want or need the entire database at your fingertips
as you query the database from the Web. At the same time, you don’t want the
information “dumbed down”—that is, devoid of structure—so much that you can’t perform
further analysis at your end (say, generate graphs).
The solution, therefore, is to use XML
as a transport mechanism for sending the data from your database to
clients via their
browsers, for example, where they can perform further manipulation. The client and the
server will
exchange information in XML, and the server and the database engine will
have translators between them to convert the XML information such as a query into a
format used by the database engine (say, SQL).
