The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML

XML is the industry standard for the sharing, formatting, and processing of data. Still, the bulk of applications that require persistent storage use relational databases, converting data to and from XML, and adding overhead, latency, and unnecessary application layers. This book covers Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, an embedded XML database, and will show you how to avoid that added overhead by utilizing a storage mechanism that stores the data natively in XML. Berkeley DB XML runs on all major operating systems and has support for the most popular programming languages.

Berkeley DB XML has the potential to dramatically change and simplify the development of your application's data tier. Programmers and engineers owe it to themselves to understand the technologies that are taught in this book. XML developers love it for its elegance: BDB XML brings that same elegance to the data store: no more SQL, no more database daemons, no more complex schemas or table techniques to make semantically rich data relational. Of course relational database have and will always have a place in network applications. But for a large portion of the applications being built, BDB XML is a superior solution.

Danny Brian presents XML basics from the ground up, installation and configuration of Berkeley DB XML, and then delves into the cutting-edge technologies behind Berkeley DB XML: flexible XML indexing, powerful queries with XPath 2.0, and complex operations using XQuery and FLWOR expressions. The book continues with coverage of the API for C++, Java, Perl, Python, and PHP. In this book you will also learn how to manage the database and learn tips and tricks that you can immediately apply to your own applications.