Kevin S. Clarke wrote:

> Fwiw Andrew, I'd suggest you are not seeing the "true spirit of your
> NXDB."  Try to put MARC into a RDBMS and you are going to run into the
> same problem.  You have to index intelligently or reorganize the data
> (which is the default when you put XML into a RDBMS anyway).  Perhaps
> a criticism of NXDBs could be that they make sound like they can
> handle anything you throw at them without regard for what that is...
> "If it is XML, we can handle it."

I agree, and that is why I have refactored the marcxml into a format
that I feel an NXDB can handle.  They cannot handle any XML format, and
I have heard confessions from the developers of these systems about this
point exactly.  It seems that we can all agree that both marc and
marcxml are bad formats!

>
> Data can have a structure that makes it more accessible or less.  The
> promise of XML (as a storage format rather than transmission format
> (which is its other purpose)) is that you can work with data in its
> native format (no deconstruction necessary).  However, there is
> nothing about XML or NXDBs that makes one use a well structured data
> format.

No, you are right.  NXDB's are too dumb to determine if your XML format
is going to work or not.  But the wonders of XSLT make it simple to
transform to another modified format that an NXDB can handle well.

So ... while we are on this topic.  You wouldn't want to index marcxml
records in lucene, you would use marc21, right?  Why deal with the
overhead of xml if it is not necessary.  We have to format our data no
matter what for to best fit our storage/search system.

Andrew