I need help from you experts about practices regarding database development. I have a few questions regarding MySQL databases:
Is there a way for MySQL that a database and its structure is developed in an XML language and then converted to a fully functional MySQL database?
Is it possible to generate the XML source file from question 1 (see above) based on an existing database in MySQL ?
As far as I know, XML is not suitable for developing database structures. However can we say that XML is a language to demonstrate hierarchical structures and a MySQL database also shows a hierarchical structure, so in fact it is suitable for database development?
Thank you very much!
You can certainly store XML data in MySQL. You can also use any number of approaches to converted hierachical XML data into individual relational database field representations.
I would however say that if you just want to work with intact XML documents, you might look to go the NoSQL route, which is really better suited for this type of data storage. You also might consider JSON as the format for storage as it is more concise (saves space and transmissions badnwidth) and is more aligned with the popular NoSQL data stores out there.
1) yeah there is a way, but you should check out mongodb if you want a dynamic database structure, it was developed with that in mind. also, unless you need the rss features of xml or something similar, you might want to consider using json as a format for you documents.
2) json and mongodb work very well together to quickly and easily get documents in and out of the db. you can technically do it in mysql as well, but you might spend more time scripting in php or ruby to get the desired format you want.
3) you could use xml to demonstrate your db structure because of it's loose structure, but i'm not sure it would be intuitively clear to others. hard to say, really depends on how you implement it and how complicated your db structure is going to be.
Related
I have a very large Json object that i want to put in a nosql database.
I would like to know:
first, how to generate the database schema based on that Json object?
second, is there a way to put this object automatically in the database, without manually specifying which value (in json object) goes in which column (in the database)?
I hope I was clear enough. Thanks!
Since you haven't specified which NoSQL database you're using in particular, for convenience, I'll assume you're using MongoDB when I talk about things that are implementation specific.
First off, you should know that NoSQL databases by nature are "schema-less". You still could implement your own schema (in your app, not the db), but that's optional, and mostly done just for validation purposes or to let future developers understand the planned structure of your data better. Read the Dynamic Schemas section in this article to know more. Here is a SO answer explaining how you would do that in mongoose and here is the official guide/doc for it.
Second, NoSQL databases don't work in terms of columns or rows. Rather, you need to think in terms of collections and documents. So to answer your question : Yes, when you have a JSON object, you shove it in directly (before applying any required formatting if you've implemented a schema like in above). You don't enter data value by value (unless you've intentionally set it up to do so).
It sounds to me that you need to strengthen your fundamental understanding of how NoSQL works as you seem to be confusing yourself with concepts that belong to other DBMS. Here is a neat slideshow to get you started and the previous article I linked you to also gives you a decent introduction.
After you're done, consider installing MongoDB or something similar and just playing around with the command line interface to get a good hang of it.
So I'm thinking of using MongoDB for a project. But I've read about issues that is has with relational type of data. http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/
However, I still like that it stores json and can have dynamic fields within collections. I like that it resembles my json in my app so I can easily bind to it using libraries like Angular. I use Node.js. I'm digging this whole MEAN (mongodb, express, angular, node) stack concept.
What I don't like though are these relational issues, it seems that it doesn't deal too well with real world data. Think a relational app: school/students/teachers with all sorts of relationships in them.
That said, I don't like sql. I think it's outdated especially for json/javascript based webapps and I don't like to define types, I don't like that it's hard to dynamically add fields to a table and I don't like to manually do joins.
So my question is.. is there something in the middle? Somewhere in the middle between a mysql database and a mongodb database? Maybe a normalized json store that handles the relationships for me. Or a mongo-like db that is really fast with references (as opposed to putting everything in the same document).
p.s I know there are such things as MySQL ORMs. but I want the actual database to store json, kind of like mongodb does, but just to be able to handle relational data as well.
Have a look at ElasticSearch. It's much more powerful than MongoDB, scales better, and it supports nested documents and joins, which are not really the same as in a relational database, but -like you say- it's somewhere inbetween.
http://www.elasticsearch.com/
I have a few XML files containing data for a research project which I need to run some statistics on. The amount of data is close to 100GB.
The structure is not so complex (could be mapped to perhaps 10 tables in a relational model), and given the nature of the problem, this data will never be updated again, I only need it available in a place where it's easy to run queries on.
I've read about XML databases, and the possibility of running XPATH-style queries on it, but I never used them and I'm not so comfortable with it. Having the data in a relational database would be my preferred choice.
So, I'm looking for a way to covert the data stored in XML into a relational database (think of a big .sql file similar to the one generated by mysqldump, but anything else would do).
The ultimate goal is to be able to run SQL queries for crunching the data.
After some research I'm almost convinced I have to write it on my own.
But I feel this is a common problem, and therefore there should be a tool which already does that.
So, do you know of any tool that would transform XML data into a relational database?
PS1:
My idea would be something like (it can work differently, but just to make sure you get my point):
Analyse the data structure (based on the XML themselves, or on a XSD)
Build the relational database (tables, keys) based on that structure
Generate SQL statements to create the database
Generate SQL statements to create fill in the data
PS2:
I've seen some posts here in SO but still I couldn't find a solution.
Microsoft's "Xml Bulk Load" tool seems to do something in that direction, but I don't have a MS SQL Server.
Databases are not the only way to search data. I can highly recommend Apache Solr
Strategies to Implement search on XML file
Keep your raw data as XML and search it using the Solr index
Importing XML files of the right format into a MySql database is easy:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/load-xml.html
This means, you typically have to transform your XML data into that kind of format. How you do this depends on the complexity of the transformation, what programming languages you know, and if you want to use XSLT (which is most probably a good idea).
From your former answers it seems you know Python, so http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/python.html may be the right thing for you to start with.
Take a look at StAX instead of XSD for analyzing/extraction of data. It's stream based and can deal with huge XML files.
If you feel comfortable with Perl, I've had pretty good luck with XML::Twig module for processing really big XML files.
Basically, all you need is to setup few twig handlers and import your data into MySQL using DBI/DBD::mysql.
There is pretty good example on xmltwig.org.
If you comfortable with commercial products, you might want to have a look at Data Wizard for MySQL by the SQL Maestro Group.
This application is targeted especially at exporting and, of course, importing data from/ to MySQL databases. This also includes XML import. You can download a 30-day trial to check if this is what you are looking for.
I have to admit that I did not use the MySQL product line from them yet, but I had a good user experience with their Firebird Maestro and SQLite Maestro products.
This is kind of implementation question maybe. I wonder if I where to make a tool to convert some relational database to some other kind of database. What would the approach be?
If I for example want to convert data and the structure from a mysql database to mssql. Would I need to use regular expression to parse the SQL-file? Or maybe I could convert it to XML or JSON first and from that structure parse into my targeted database?
Using existing tools for converting mysql to mssql or anything similar is not in this scope. Since I want to know how it is actually done.
Well it's kind of a broad question, but generally speaking, having your own abstract representation of the structure and data would be a good thing, because you could extend your system "easily" by writing importers and exporters, and actually decouple your code a little by abstracting the relational db concepts into your own format.
The importers would "reverse engineer" a given database, by converting it to your own representation (as you say, xml/json or even your own query language -that would be better I guess-). Then the exporters would just convert from your format to the requested SQL dialect. No regular expressions, no other stuff "hardcoded".
This will allow you to extend your system and support a bigger number of sources and targets, and also handle errors like some SQL features from a "source" not supported in the selected "target".
My 2 cents, hope it helps!
Folks,
I have been tasked with recforing a large system that comprises many javascript based worktools/workflows into something more manageable.
The first part of this is to refactor the data. All data is currently stored as JSON strings in a SQL database. So for each worktool which could be anything from a set of forms to an interactive chart all data is stored as one JSON string in a record associated with the worktool.
Now I have been told that due to the complexity of the object graph behind some of these worktools that it would be fairly futile to look for commonalities that would allow me to model a relational schema from the data. That this schema would either have to be some really generic key value based structure, or that we would need hundreds of tables.
Im wondering now if there is value in using a non relational persistance mechanism, such as NOSQL. I am only looking into this now, but I would really appreciate anyones opinions here who have experience of a similar context of operation or of NOSQL products and process.
Thank you
You can just move your data as is to RavenDB.
It natively understand JSON and you can start querying / working with those documents as first class members.
RavenDB also has a great set of client libraries, which make working with it a breeze.