Interview with the Creator of the EServer TC Library

Tom Johnson has an interview the site's creator, Geoff Sauer, who explains some of the details behind the site. I found the discussion of their taxonomy particularly interesting, as it's a problem I've struggled with in my own site.

Soltsys, Keith. Core Dump (2008). Articles>TC>Information Design>Databases

XQuery in Relational Database Systems

Relational database systems (and the related standards body ANSI/INCITS H2) are busy adding XML support. One of the main components of such XML extensions will be support for the upcoming XML query language XQuery. The presentation will outline how XQuery and XML conceptually fit into a relational database environment. It will cover the organization of the XML in the database, how to type it using W3C XML Schema, how to query it both in conjunction with SQL and using top-level XQuery. It will present the concepts, talk about new developments in the ISO/ANSI SQL/XML standards and present some demos of XQuery in the upcoming Microsoft® SQL Server 2005.

Rys, Michael. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

XML, Queries, and Databases

XML has dramatically changed the way we exchange and store data, and a new crop of standards promises to change the way we query data. On today's Internet, most data is queried and stored using relational databases, exchanged as XML, and displayed as HTML. For those who need to use XML and databases together, the last five years have been chaotic, creative, interesting, and often frustrating. Every major database vendor has added XML support, but each vendor takes a very different approach, and sometimes changes that approach dramatically from one version to the next. Today, the vendors seem to be lining up behind XQuery and the SQL/XML mappings - is this just the latest wave of marketing hype, or has the industry now found its way?

Robie, Jonathan. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

Integrating Messaging and Databases to Implement Service Architectures

There has been much debate over two quite different approaches to implementing XML services. The "web services" approach leverages a rather large and not yet stabilized stack of formats and protocols built on top of SOAP that promise secure, reliable operations; the "REST" or "Plain old XML over HTTP" approach keeps the basic formats and operations quite simple, but puts the burden for any security or end-to-end reliability on the application developer rather than the computing infrastructure. This presentation considers a third approach which complements many of the ideas in both WS and REST but uses an XML-capable DBMS as the messaging hub or service broker. This makes it feasible to support asynchronous, loosely coupled communications between service requesters and providers.

Champion, Michael. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

Migrating from MS SQL Server 2008 to EnterpriseDB

With many database vendor products in the market and data intensive applications using them, it is often required to port the application to use the data or, migrate the data so that the application can use it. Migration of data is therefore one of the realities of the IT Industry. Some of the author's previous articles on migration can be found at the link.

Krishnaswamy, Jayaram. Packt (2009). Articles>Information Design>Databases>SQL

Programmatically Creating SSRS Report in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

The process of programmatically creating the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) tabular report is described. You will be creating a very simple report using the provided code. The approach is to introduce the programming by creating the three parts of a report: connection, dataset, and layout. Excerpt from the book, "Learning SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.'

Krishnaswamy, Jayaram. Packt (2009). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Reports

Transferring a Table in a MS Access 2003 Database to PostGres Using SQL Server Integration Services  

Describes the use of Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services to transfer a table from MS Access 2003 to Postgres on EnterpriseDB. Some of the problems are discussed.

Krishnaswamy, Jayaram. SSWUG (2009). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Microsoft Access

Consistency-Preserving Caching of Dynamic Database Content  

With the growing use of dynamic web content generated from relational databases, traditional caching solutions for throughput and latency improvements are ineffective. We describe a middleware layer called Ganesh that reduces the volume of data transmitted without semantic interpretation of queries or results. It achieves this reduction through the use of cryptographic hashing to detect similarities with previous results. These benefits do not require any compromise of the strict consistency semantics provided by the back-end database. Further, Ganesh does not require modifications to applications, web servers, or database servers, and works with closed-source applications and databases. Using two benchmarks representative of dynamic web sites, measurements of our prototype show that it can increase end-to-end throughput by as much as twofold for non-data intensive applications and by as much as tenfold for data intensive ones.

Tolia, Niraj and M. Satyanarayanan. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Databases

XML Design for Relational Storage  

Design principles for XML schemas that eliminate redundancies and avoid update anomalies have been studied recently. Several normal forms, generalizing those for relational databases, have been proposed. All of them, however, are based on the assumption of a native XML storage, while in practice most of XML data is stored in relational databases. In this paper we study XML design and normalization for relational storage of XML documents. To be able to relate and compare XML and relational designs, we use an information-theoretic framework that measures information content in relations and documents, with higher values corresponding to lower levels of redundancy. We show that most common relational storage schemes preserve the notion of being well-designed (i.e., anomalies- and redundancy-free). Thus, existing XML normal forms guarantee well-designed relational storages as well. We further show that if this perfect option is not achievable, then a slight restriction on XML constraints guarantees a “second-best” relational design, according to possible values of the information-theoretic measure. We finally consider an edge-based relational representation of XML documents, and show that while it has similar information-theoretic properties with other relational representations, it can behave significantly worse in terms of enforcing integrity constraints.

Kolahi, Solmaz and Leonid Libkin. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>Databases

Acrobat 9: PDF Data to Excel

Rather than exporting a whole document out of Acrobat, I'll focus on a table within a PDF page. Suppose you'd like to have this table's data in a spreadsheet so you can manipulate it. There's no need to retype the data into Excel. All you need to do is use Acrobat's Selection tool to highlight the content you wish to export.

Mankin, David R. Blogs.com (2009). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Adobe Acrobat

Top Five Best Database Management Tools

For a database administrator, DBM (database management) tools make tasks related to maintaining relational databases efficient and fast. Prior to the popularity of these tools, most DBA’s had to use the command line to create, edit, and delete databases. In this article, we present to you the top five most popular/most voted for database management tools.

Gube, Jacob. Six Revisions (2009). Articles>Information Design>Software>Databases