Open Source XML Databases?

tarun asks: "I am creating the next version of my open source UDDI registry and decided to use an XML database backend - if I can find any good ones. The reason to make this choice was that I was impressed by oracle and db2's xml capabilities in my past lives. However, when I tried looking for an open-source alternative it seems there is nothing around except perhaps xindice -which clearly is less then perfect. I am looking for something that can work with more than one existing databases (I will ship my software with MySQL but if a large organization wants to deploy it, it should be able to do it using Oracle, DB2 or whatever they want to use) and xindice currently only works with Berkley-DB. Also, I am looking for something that can create database tables for me given an XML schema (I can tweak it later to create indexes, stored procedures etc) and given an XML document - write it to these tables. If it supports something standard like Xupdate or XQuery, that is even better."

"There are some other XML Database projects but either they have too few features or are not open-source. What is the XML-aware portion of the Slashdot community using? Have you ever run across such problems? Do you guys create your database schemas by pain-stackingly copying every element in every XML schema you have to handle to database tables and write huge amount of parsing/deparsing code both ways?"

Re:Why XML?

[jashua]

I've found it's in retrieving XML documents from the database. It's easy to parse a document and write it to relational tables but it can be, with complicated documents, a real pain to write XML taking the data from a realtional database. It's also more coding work too.

What's wrong with Xindice?

[DevilM]

I am curious what the poster thinks is wrong with Xindice. He seems to indicate that he is looking for an XML to RDBMS mapping engine, not a native XML database. Further, he seems to think that Xindice is limited to one type of store. This is simply not true.

In Xindice, XML documents are stored in collections that have filers associated with them that do the actually storage. Xindice provides a Filer interface as well as several different implementations both in-memory and persistent. Additionally, it would be quite trival to implement a DBFiler that stored the data in an RDBMS.

So again I ask, what is wrong with Xindice?