Today our system receives input files from mainframe systems in custom format. However starting next year, we will be getting some files in XML format. Today the lead developer on that task shared some of the technology options to deal with reading the input data.I liked some of the first options that were presented. Essentially they were using a high level language such as C or Java to work with the XML parser provided by Oracle Corporation. The destination of our data is a huge Oracle database.
One of the other options was to use XML DB to pull the XML right into our database as XML. Then we could use some code to further process the XML data from the database. This sounded good as we have a number of developers with Oracle PL/SQL coding talent.
A DBA on our project thought storing huge amounts of XML in our database would be painfully slow. Instead he recommended we transform the data using XSLT. The we could directly load the transformed data into our database with quick loading programs from Oracle. This was all good food for thought.
