Category: SQL, XML/SQL, XPath, XQuery
May 14

XML Posts After One Year

I once started this website because of the steep learning curve regarding XMLDB functionality. After one year of existence the following posts were written by mean , for me as a notepad to remember what I have learned and or checked, tested or figured out and to pass it on to all those who are interested in XMLDB functionality as well.

I hope these posts, this list provided here, will be of help, to make those first steps or help designing a working and performing XMLDB environment. There is still a lot to describe and learn and hopefully I have time to cover these in the second year to come.

Have fun reading.

😎

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April 18

About the XML(DB) W3C DateTime format while converting Java DateTime

Triggered by a post from Eddie Awad about Current Date in an Oracle database called “Give Me The Current Date Please”, I thought about a XMLDB Forum discussion that ended up in a discussion about JavaDateTime. This discussion focussed me also on XML date time formats. Those XML (W3C) date time formats are explained on their website under the section “XML Schema Part 2 – Datatypes Second Edition“.

Two questions came to my mind:

  1. What is a java date time?
  2. What is the official XML format date time mask that should be used?

After some searching and asking my developer AMIS colleagues some questions, it came down to the following answer regarding a definition for java date time:

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March 19

Using XMLDIFF for Database Change Management

I was triggered by a presentation of Dominic Delmolino during Hotsos 2008. He demonstrated a cool way of applying DDL database change management while making use of the Oracle database audit functionality. I combined the idea with Laurent Schneiders “out of the XML box thinking“, like for instance, his alternative use of the XMLTABLE syntax creating a pivot table. So why not do it the same way, solving “relational” problems, via XML functionality.

As said, the idea came up during Dominic Delmolino Hotsos presentation. Since Oracle 11g, the XMLDB functionality has a build in function called XMLDIFF. In Oracle 10 only a Java and C API exists, but probably could be used in the same way as described here. The XMLDIFF function compares two XML documents and captures the differences in XML conforming to an Xdiff schema. The diff document is returned as an XMLType document. Playing with Dominico’s idea, I thought, why not try to use the DBMS_METADATA.GET_XML function, transform this to an XMLType and then process it via XMLDIFF, and see if this can be useful for database change management purposes. So I tried.

So here it goes.

An example script can be downloaded here

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