XML vs. SQL

[Roger Schuster]

Hello cavers,

following the recent discussion I got the impression that most cavers 
favorite a cave survey data format which is derived from XML or another 
type of markup language. I think XML isn't the "silver bullet" that can 
solve all problems and can be used for storing any kind of data. For 
exchanging data XML is good but poor for everyday work. 

What's about storing data in a SQL data base? A SQL data base has this 
advantages: 

- Lots of data bases are freeware or even open source products so you
   can use them free of charge, e.g. ADABAS, Interbase, SAP DB,  MySQL,
   PostgreSQL etcetera. 
- Most of them are available for several operating systems.
- SQL is as well as XML an industry standard.
- Lots of ODBC / JDBC drivers are available and ready for production.
- SQL servers are ready for network computing. Today many cave 
   expeditions have participants from around the globe so that working 
   with shared and distributed resources is important. 
- SQL is fast.
- And now the most important: SQL is flexible and easy to use. Even on 
   the text console only a few lines of code are enough to do complex 
   data base queries. You can put many different types of data in
   different data base tables and join, sort and re-organize them on
   the fly in any way you want. For example you can put the survey raw 
   data in a table and geological data in another table and merge 
   them together. In XML you either produce a large and complicated 
   text file with a huge amount of additional data or you have to 
   fiddle around with several files. Probably the user must write his /
   her own tools to read, convert and process the additional data. In 
   SQL this is an easy task with standard query commands.

My 0.2 Euro, any comments? 

Roger