Why Standards for XML and Databases?
Enterprise applications access and work with data from multiple, disparate sources. Traditionally, developers haven’t had a standard or easy way to integrate these data sources. For example, most Web applications have connections to databases and use XML to transfer data from the database to the Web applications and vice versa. Every major database vendor has proprietary extensions for using XML with relational databases, but most take completely different approaches and there is no interoperability. On Web pages, XML is useful because the structure of XML closely matches the structure of HTML. But most of the data for these Web pages comes from relational databases and needs to be converted for presentation to the user. For Web messages the format is often specified by a standards organization or a trade partner, and these formats are generally hierarchical. These examples illustrate the need for developers to have a standard way to work with all data sources — including relational,
