Professional XML Databases

1 How did you first come to be writing for Wrox?

After getting heavily involved in XML development and working on the MISMO XML mortgage standards effort, I realized that I had some skills that I could use to help others get ramped up in what was shaping up to be a key Internet technology. I contacted Wrox initially with the idea of doing some technical reviews; I was then asked to write a chapter and the rest, as they say is history.

2 What part of the book did you enjoy writing the most? If different from the first point, what part of the book do you see as the most important to the topic as a whole?

I enjoyed writing the application chapters; data warehousing, marshalling & presentation and the data transmission chapter the most. I'm very much an engineer rather than a theorist and those chapters gave me the opportunity to show how XML can be used in the enterprise to solve problems. I think these chapters are very important for the typical Wrox reader, as they demonstrate how to use the technology rather than just describing it.

3 What database platform do you see as being most important in the future of XML database integration?

I believe that Microsoft SQL Server will be widely used as a backbone for XML-based applications. With the new XML support functionality added in SQL Server 2000 along with the focus of Microsoft's .NET platform on XML, being able to use SQL Server to store and manipulate documents will become essential skills.

4 What did you want to achieve with the book?

One of the things I realized early in my experience with XML is that no one seemed to be writing anything about the use of XML for data. Since XML evolved out of SGML, all the reference materials and articles seemed to be very focused on the use of XML as a markup language. However, I found that many of the techniques described there were not directly applicable to the representation of structured data in XML. I felt that a book tailored to the manipulation of data with XML would fill a prominent gap in the XML bookshelves.

5 When did you first start to venture along the road of databases? What database did you start off your involvement with?

I've been doing database work for about eleven years now. I started out doing SQL Server work on the OS/2 platform in 1989, which was interesting - we were using OS/2 as the server and Windows 2.0 as the client, of all things. I've also done some Oracle work here and there over the course of my career and I've been doing SQL Server work pretty much continuously ever since.

6 Similarly, when did your involvement with XML start, and what bit of XML technology was it with? Was it before or after your involvement with databases, and if after (as I suspect it is), when and how did this lead on to XML database integration?

I got involved with XML about two years ago. The company I was with at the time was a business-to-business mortgage exchange and we were encountering a lot of difficulties with data exchange - everyone had their own formats for things, everyone represented data differently, and so on. After doing a little research, we found that there was a lot of interest within the mortgage community in coming up with an XML standard, so I took the technical lead and we started developing what later became the MISMO standard. Because of our strong data focus (rather than document focus), XML database integration was my main concern right from the start - how the information could be transmitted and then persisted to our relational database system for searching and summarization.

7 What part of the SQL Server 2000 XML functionality do you see as the most important and useful.

I think the ability to store XML documents and extract documents from tables with little or no effort is going to be very important. Much of the code written by XML developers these days is focused on the marshaling of data from, and persistence of data to, some other storage medium (such as a relational database). Making this easier (as the new functionality does) will decrease application development time and shorten development lifecycles.

8 What scripting language do you feel is most useful for adding functionality to web applications that are linked to databases? Give a brief description of what you would use this scripting language for in such an app.

While this certainly depends on the platform for which the application is being developed, I feel that on the Microsoft platform, VBScript is key. From the XML perspective, I don't think that the scripting languages are going to be as important as the libraries that are available, and certainly MSXML 3.0 appears to be a strong contender at this point. I think a typical data marshalling process would pull the data from the database in XML using the SQL Server 2000 XML helper functionality. It would then load that data into an instance of the MSXML 3.0 objects and transform it using appropriate XSLT into the desired output format.

9 What other technologies are currently capturing your interest?

I think that RDF is going to be extremely important going forward in XML development. From a data perspective, I can imagine a master definition document that individual company schemas would reference; then, documents passed from one company to another would be computer-understandable owing to their RDF definitions. I also think that XML Query is a technology to watch - while it's in its early stages, it promises to be a very flexible way to access and filter XML documents.

10 What are your views on the new release of Netscape 6?

While I haven't had an opportunity to work with it directly yet, it sounds great - the support for XML using James Clark's expat parser as well as the RDF capabilities should make it possible to easily perform client-side manipulation of XML documents.

11 Apart from writing splendid material for our books, what do you like to do in your spare time?

Your typical programmer stuff - I read everything in sight (my library is larger than some bookstores I've been to), play video games (mostly RPGs) obsessively, and watch a lot of movies.

12 And finally, who would be your guests at a fantasy dinner party? Would anyone from the computer world figure in your plans?

Let's see… Tim Berners-Lee, Neal Stephenson, Katsuhiro Otomo, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, the Wachowski brothers, the entire cast (except for the dead one of course) of Monty Python, Minette Walters, Harlan Ellison, Wu Ping…

Courtesy for Wrox Press