Category: Howto
November 10

HOWTO: Validate XML data

Sometimes the “how to validate XML” question arises again on the OTN XMLDB Forum. A quick start would be to read up on the XMLDB FAQ Forum questions were Mark Drake demonstrates XML validation via some good examples. Another resource would be to read the Oracle XMLDB Developers Guide chapter about “Transforming and Validating XMLType Data“.

People who just like me, try to answer for fun and/or as a mind game the questions on a Oracle OTN forum, and knowing that if you do not ask for specifics, that you will have to deal with “the merry go round exercise”: With every answer given, you discover that this wasn’t the solution which was hoped for. Sometimes I am up for this because I don’t want to be bitching about:

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October 18

OSDM: Not There Yet…(Reverse Engineering XMLTypes)

Driven by a post from Lewis about “OSDM: Rerverse Engineer A Schema“, I dared my luck to play with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler (OSDM), trying to see if it understands the XML database realm off doing things. It doesn’t understands it…at least, yet.  I used the early adopter release 1.5.1 (build 518).

I wonder if it is reasonable that I am disappointed; In the long run the “XDB” schema that I used to reverse engineer isn’t relational but (at least) object-relational. Most of the object relational issues, OSDM understands, but not the theory behind XMLType tables. I tried it multiple times, in the end, even the “secondary tables” and “spatial properties” option you can check during the reverse enginering option.

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September 5

XMLDB Performance: Environment, Set-up, Procedure

There has some time past since my last update on my XMLDB Performance, tuning, adventure. As you maybe have read, I had my problems to set-up a decent test environment and loading XML data. I am testing with an Mediawiki XML dumpfile. If there is a problem or a side effect to notice than I have a big chance that it will show up if not only by the size of this Mediawiki XML dumpfile. The Mediawiki XML dumpfile contains, when I downloaded it, almost 8 million records and has a file size on Windows NT NFS of 17,4 Gigabyte.

Loading this data via the procedures described in my posts, “HOWTO: Load Really Big XML Files” and “Setting Up an XMLDB Performance “Baseline” Environment (Part 02)” dealt with some of the issues I encountered to realize controllable testing set-up. Loading this amount of XML data will take some time.

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