One of the more pressing problems is how to store and manage XML data. “There are really three ways you can do this,” says John Matranga, CTO of Omicron Consulting, in Philadelphia.

As an XML-enabled database, SQL Server only allows you to store XML documents as unstructured objects in the database or to shred the XML data into relational tables.

IBM’s native XML storage feature “doesn’t add any value,” said Mark Drake, an XML technology manager at Oracle. Viper will also support XQuery for processing XML data, along with standard SQL.

3. XML storage won’t have the same drawbacks that hierarchical/network products did. Hierarchical systems failed because reusing data in multiple apps was too difficult. Today, however, RDBMS vendors ...

They also provide the data in a hierarchical format.When storing data in relational systems, an external primary key may be attached to the XML document for maintaining primary document keys.

IBM and Oracle promise deep XML support in upcoming versions of their databases. With Web services on the rise, Eric Knorr says these solutions could help you get a handle all that XML data.