Re: [ubl-dev] UBL and a functional SQL schema

[Chin Chee-Kai <cheekai@softml.net>]

There were some "thoughts-in-progress" along the lines you
mentioned, which I was hoping to expound further in my
mid-Feb trip to Paris-London, but ended up enjoying too much
of these cities... :)

Anyway, like you said, it's not difficult to start rolling
up the sleeves and scribbling something SQLish.  The difficult
parts that I found was in unrolling the recursive references
in the ABIEs, finding "suitable" fixed values for the unboundedness
of those 0..n cardinalities, and mapping various UBL namespaces 
onto tables.  Potentially there may be a few ways of doing
it, giving differently structured SQL schema sets that could
cater to most UBL instances, but unable to absorb some 
elaborate instances that mobilizes every aspect of the UBL
schemas.

Otherwise, it's easy :)

And, to be fair to the XML Database folks, SoftwareAG has been
doing XML databases for years and their Tamino Servers are
quite well respected.  But even the best products may also
not seem "there" to you likely because even a hand-crafted
RDBMS schema would need to work around, first, the above concerns
on UBL schema--> SQL schema (with instance loss due to incomplete
translation).




Best Regards,
Chin Chee-Kai
SoftML
Tel: +65-6820-2979
Fax: +65-6743-7875
Email: cheekai@SoftML.Net
http://SoftML.Net/


On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, alex black wrote:

>>> Are you looking for the RDBMS table schema, or are you
>>> looking for the program codes to update the database
>>> (which would assume that the former exists)?
>>> Tel: +65-6820-2979
>>> Fax: +65-6743-7875
>>> Email: cheekai@SoftML.Net
>>> http://SoftML.Net/
>>
>>I'm looking for a schema that someone has done based on UBL 1.0.
>>
>>If someone has some great little open source app and would like a
>>contributor - and it's PHP or python - great, but the schema as a
>>starter is what I'm looking for.
>>
>>Of course, I can design my own, but no point doing it if someone else
>>has gone to the trouble. Also - in thinking about implementations
>>throughout the world - that is the natural question of any experienced
>>pro who is building a system for a client: where's the SQL file
>>(schema) as a starting point so I can store this stuff in a set of
>>tables? XML Databases aren't production ready, and what limited looking
>>I've done at XQuery shows it to be.. good but not really "there". Also
>>if I'm doing anything else that related to the UBL docs it's nice to
>>have a DB :)
>>
>>thanks for any advice!
>>
>>_alex
>>
>>
>>--
>>alex black, founder
>>the turing studio, inc.
>>
>>510.666.0074
>>root@turingstudio.com
>>http://www.turingstudio.com
>>
>>2600 10th street, suite 635
>>berkeley, ca 94710
>>
>>
>>