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?"

Why XML?

[jacoberrol]

Could someone explain to me the benefits of an XML database? I can't think of an XML document that can't be expressed as a relation. I've seen vague references to performance advantages and ease of development [xmldb.org] for certain applications, but I haven't heard a convincing argument. Am I missing something, or is this just XML hype?

Re:Why XML?

[Ayende Rahien]

What about using an hiercial DB? They *are* the most efficent kind, in all terms.

What do you want?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want to force XML into a relational database, or do you want to do relational operations on XML data in an XML database? Are you more interested in indexing/searching XML data, like informaton retrieval systems do, or updating it like relational databses do?