Paul Fuller wrote:
> XML is also quite hierarchical in nature.  Of course it can be used in 
> different ways but often it is just a tree structure with tags possibly 
> at different levels.

True. My take on that is that if you don't have arbitrary unstructured CDATA 
in it, XML is the wrong tool. :-)

> Not sure what to make of the likes of Hadoop and Big Table yet.  I have 
> the impression that they are more distributed file systems that offer 
> some aspects of distributed DBMS - either hierarchical, relational or 
> whatever else you care to put on top of them.

GFS is just a big file system. Bigtable is a database shaped like a giant 
spreadsheet (hence the name). And sure, there are all kinds of other 
databases, like CouchDB, Amazon's various offerings, and you might consider 
the whole web one giant distributed database in some sense. Lots of 
interesting research going on out there.

But if you need a transactional ACID database, relational is pretty much the 
only modern (non-legacy) contender.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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