MySQL with XML

The data is stored in a MySQL database [14]. However, the data is not stocked in an ordinary relational database but partly in an XML-file which is entirely stored in a field defined as longtext. In theory this allows to easily represent hierarchical data in a relational database.

As the Beta-version of MySQL-server used for this project does not fully integrate XML, some special solutions were necessary. As the only command provided is extractvalue, it is not possible to directly modify data stored as XML. However, the XML was composed in the BLL in our project and then sent as a complete string to the database. The XML interface offered by MySQL is only used for extraction of values of the database.

Although the current project does not actually require XML, the decision was made to use this feature in order to have the possibility to get to know this important technology.