Re: XML ouput for psql

* Merlin Moncure <merlin(dot)moncure(at)rcsonline(dot)com> [2003-03-05 10:02]:

> > Acually, the difficult part has been getting the information back
> > into the database. Getting it out is a very simple query. I imagine
> > that every language/environment has an SQL->XML library somewhere,
> > but I wasn't able to find something that would go from XML to SQL.

> XSLT could be used to convert virtually any xml table format directly
> into an insert statement. For me, this is better than using a
> programming language plus a parser. XSLT is quite powerful and fast and
> is build on top of xpath, and is a closer fit to the declarative
> programming model of sql. Validation could be done at the xslt stage or
> with schemas, which I prefer.

XSLT, or Perl, or anything. That's not a problem. It becomes a
problem when I have to hand write insert/update statements for every
type of element in an XML document.

<person>
<first-name>Alan</first-name>
<last-name>Gutierrez</last-name>
<ssn>1234565789</ssn>
</person>

If I feed this document to a database I want it to absorb the
document, inserting if doesn't already exists, updating it if it
does. There is no way to test for the existstence of a record in a
person table during an XSLT transformation.

--
Alan Gutierrez - ajglist(at)izzy(dot)net
http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/ - KHTML on Windows