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Oracle and XML

by Steve Muench
09/13/2000

There's never been a better time to be a Web application developer who knows how to exploit the Oracle database. The Internet is driving an unprecedented demand for access to information, and the majority of leading Internet businesses run their growing enterprises on Oracle databases. The most innovative ones make sophisticated use of databases to assemble dynamic, personalized pages that put key information at their customers' fingertips, or that present products and services more likely to be interesting to those customers. Behind the scenes, application developers are constantly looking for ways to make their databases work even harder.

More than ever before, developers need to be able to rapidly acquire, integrate, repurpose, and exchange information with other applications to feed their growing databases and to coordinate their business operations with those of partners and suppliers over the Web. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) dramatically simplifies these tasks.

By defining a universal standard for electronic data exchange, XML unlocks the potential for a "Data Web" of information services and facilitates machine-to-machine exchanges of XML-based "datagrams." Rather than receiving HTML pages that present airline schedules, price lists, and product information in an attractive visual format, XML allows you to request and receive the raw data itself for further processing. XML offers many benefits:

  • By providing a vendor-neutral, platform-agnostic, human-readable data exchange format, XML streamlines the job of integrating existing applications that run on different operating systems and that use different databases.

  • By enabling applications to send and receive XML datagrams over the Web, developers can more easily automate the interaction of their systems with the systems of their suppliers.

  • By providing a data representation that's easy to transform into multiple target formats, XML simplifies the job of information publishing and reuse.

With the exploding number of Web-enabled devices and the emergence of an increasing number of XML-based standards, the ability to assemble information from multiple sources and transform it for delivery in any XML-based format, HTML, or text as required by the target device is incredibly powerful.

Publishing XML datagrams from your Oracle database and storing the XML datagrams you receive in the database gives you a knockout combination. You retain the proven scalability, reliability, manageability, and performance of the Oracle database and the tools and applications that work with it. You also gain the newfound ability to exchange information with anyone, anywhere over the Web, in any appropriate format.

Steve Muench is Oracle's lead XML Technical Evangelist and development lead for Oracle XSQL Pages. He is Oracle's primary representative to the W3C XSL Working Group, as well as a consulting product manager and developer working on Oracle Business Components for Java--an XML-based business object framework. Steve's been a frequent presenter at both Oracle and XML technical conferences, and has been a catalyst in helping development teams across Oracle weave XML and XSLT sensibly into their future development plans.

O'Reilly & Associates will soon release (September 2000) Building Oracle XML Applications.