Re: Native XML

On 02/27/2011 10:45 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Anton<antonin(dot)houska(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> I've been playing with 'native XML' for a while and now wondering if
>> further development of such a feature makes sense for Postgres.
>> ...
>> Unlike 'libxml2', the parser uses palloc()/pfree(). The output format is
>> independent from any 3rd party code.
> Hmm, so this doesn't rely on libxml2 at all? Given the amount of pain
> that library has caused us, getting out from under it seems like a
> mighty attractive idea. How big a chunk of code do you think it'd be
> by the time you complete the missing features?
>
>

TBH, by the time it does all the things that libxml2, and libxslt, which
depends on it, do for us, I think it will be huge. Do we really want to
be maintaining a complete xpath and xslt implementation? I think that's
likely to be a waste of our scarce resources.

I use Postgres' XML functionality a lot, so I'm all in favor of
improving it, but rolling our own doesn't seem like the best way to go.

As for the pain, we seem to be over the worst of it, AFAICT. It would be
nice to move the remaining pieces of the xml2 contrib module into the core.

cheers

andrew