[xquery-talk] Re: The State of Native XML databases

[Jeff Dexter]

Heh, for the record I leave the marketing to the marketers, and I don't want
anyone to think I'm trying to pit two products against each other here, I'm
just trying to illustrate some of the issues people will face in highly
concurrent XQuery apps. I'd be curious to see the approaches others have
taken, and I'm hoping it's a good discussion for a community looking to
leverage XQuery for increasingly more complex (and concurrent) applications.

Jeff.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Snelson [mailto:john.snelson at oracle.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 3:14 PM
To: Jeff Dexter
Cc: 'Ronald Bourret'; talk at xquery.com
Subject: Re: [xquery-talk] Re: The State of Native XML databases

It's not surprising that we disagree given our respective products. 
However it seems to me that you are mixing the marketing message with the
technical details.

The user wants highly concurrent updates - the fact that node level locking
can give them that does not mean that they are equivalent. Most users
wouldn't want or need to know anything about locking.

John

Jeff Dexter wrote:
> OK, I don't want to sounds like I'm always disagreeing, but I disagree 
> :)
> 
> I'd be curious to hear from users on this, but in my experience the 
> notion of a "page" is too nebulous for most users. Granted, it's 
> sub-document, but what subset of the document does it represent. If 
> there's a clear mapping between a page and the nodes in the document, 
> great, but I'd still argue that node level granularity is about the 
> most granular you can get, and users understand what a node is (well, 
> except for text node which still seems to cause the odd confused look).
> 
> On a side note, while node level locks may be the most granular, some 
> update operations may require locking multiple nodes. For instance, if 
> you replace an element that has attributes and children, a lock of the 
> element may imply a lock of its attributes and descendants as well.
> 
> Jeff.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: talk-bounces at x-query.com [mailto:talk-bounces at x-query.com] On 
> Behalf Of John Snelson
> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 7:23 AM
> To: Ronald Bourret
> Cc: talk at xquery.com
> Subject: Re: [xquery-talk] Re: The State of Native XML databases
> 
> Ronald Bourret wrote:
>> Does anybody know how many native XML databases actually support 
>> node-level locking? My impression is that most support document-level 
>> locking.
> 
> As I mentioned before, Berkeley DB XML has sub-document level locking 
> in the form of page level locking with user-configurable page size.
> 
> Talking about "node-level locking" is a bit of a red-herring - what 
> you should be interested in is sub-document granularity locking, which 
> in itself is only a means to achieve high concurrency in writes.
> 
> John
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