Understanding the native XML database

Not all the data that is found are in tabular structure and a lot of data are in unstructured form. You can't think of every data in tabular form as in the case of a Relational database. In reality you can't expect data to be in tabular form.

A Native XML database is a powerful tool in such scenarios where some xml type of processing is needed. This is felt in most of the application needs.

An xml database contains xml documents as a collection and there are many collections in an xml database. A particular collection might be of the schema. You know that each document is a set of nodes which might be a tree like structure.

Based on these points the implementation of different native xml databases might differ. Some of the databases might have different schemas for a single collection. It all depends on the implementation of the native xml database.

XQuery is used to query the xml documents and return an ordered set of records or nodes. Multiple documents can also be queries for this XPath is used. You can relate SQL to XQuery. There are lots of benefits in having a native xml database.

One is that all the data are in a single place where it is managed. Although data is the same you can have multiple views of the same data where you can hide some data from certain users if needed.

Since queries are well implemented it is faster to perform a query in a native xml database. Moreover very large documents can be processed with StreamReaders.