ORACLE SAYS IT will raise the bar in XML database and Web services support next week at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

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The buzz surrounds Oracle's XDB project that the company reports will utilize the object database functions it built in the mid-90s that allow users to store XML as an object and index the tags, then stored it in a compressed table.

Oracle has also revealed it will use OpenWorld to unveil added support for Web services standards and J2EE 1.3 in the Oracle application server. "We are also putting support for Web services in our JDeveloper tool," said Jeremy Burton, vice president of worldwide marketing at Oracle in Redwood Shores, Calif.

As for the advantages of XDB, Burton explained that XML documents are stored "natively" but will not require special treatment. "You can use SQL, and don't need to master the new XML query languages like XQuery," Burton said.

"The object technology that makes this possible was a hammer looking for a nail," Burton said, "and XML is suddenly the biggest nail on the planet. If XML had not come along, you could argue that a lot of our object development efforts were wasted effort."

"With XDB," Burton continued, "the overhead of managing XML, parsing for example, largely disappears."

Meanwhile, Oracle remains lukewarm to XQuery, the emerging XML query language from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "It is still very early stages for XQuery," said John Magee, senior director of Oracle 9i product marketing in Redwood Shores, Calif. "Any vendor who says they are offering [XQuery] is blowing smoke and not doing their customers any service."

IBM is more actively pushing XQuery. "We plan to have an alpha version [of XQuery] in DB2 next year," said Nelson Mattos, director and distinguished engineer at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose, Calif.

And Gordon Mangione, vice president of SQL Server at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., said, "The next big [development] is XQuery, how you query against XML data. It will be part of our strategy to present SQL Server as a Web service."

The biggest XML issue for all the database vendors is how to store the data. "The debate has always been," explained Magee, "do you store XML in document format or do you break it up into relational tables?"

He said the jury is in and the consensus is that you need to do both. "You can store an XML document as a BLOB [Binary Large OBject] and search on it with Oracle Text," said Magee, "or you can define a mapping that maps XML data to the standard relational format."

The issue is important because there is a new crop of XML database vendors that claim the ability to do it better. "We store the XML document natively, just as it is," said Lawell Kiing, vice president of software development at XML Global Technologies in Vancouver, Canada. "Our query engine is based on the latest draft of XQuery."

Erskin Bell, CIO of HomeSource Capital, a mortgage originator in Jupiter Fla., uses XML Global's transformation engine and database. "XML is critical for us," Bell said. "We use Oracle 9i, but we need additional XML transformation and storage functions."

Bell says his DBAs and developers use XQuery to store, modify, and retrieve XML data in XML Global's GoXML database. "If you know SQL, XQuery isn't that hard to learn. It takes about a week."

Where other vendors are concerned, Software AG plans to add XQuery to Tamino, its XML database. Currently Tamino uses a query engine based on XPath.

"Oracle essentially [performs XQuery functions] with smoke an mirrors, storing the entire XML document as a column in a relational table and allowing you to search it with their text engine," said John Taylor, senior technology officer at Software AG in Reston, Va.

No one, however, expects these XML pure plays to take on the relational vendors directly. "Software AG initially positioned Tamino as an alternative to relational databases," said Susan Funke, an analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass. "But they quickly realized the better strategy was to pursue symbiotic partnerships with other vendors including IBM, BEA, Sun, and HP to promote its solution."

"We typically sell to large customers who already have an Oracle or IBM database," said Software AG's Taylor. "We are an optional piece of IBM's WebSphere."

IBM's Mattos said that IBM Global Services does, in fact, use Tamino in some offerings, but he was not aware of any close relationship with Software AG.

All admit that native XML support is a slippery term. "Native?" said Oracle's Magee. "We can store XML as XML using the object relational capabilities we have had since the 8i release."

IBM also used object relational functions to create the DB2 XML Extender. IBM's Mattos did imply, however, that this is not yet "native" enough. "We hope to deliver real native XML capabilities in 2003, maybe sooner," Mattos said.

Analysts say integration is behind the XML database craze. "With more b-to-b sites, people are going to be passing XML documents back and forth," said Carl Olofson, an analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass. "It will be really important to store these things."