Can MySql load from XML directly - mysql

I am aware of the batch LOAD XML technique e.g. Load XML Update Table--MySQL
Can MySql insert/replace rows directly from xml. I'd like to pass an XML string to MySQL.
Something like replace into user XML VALUES maybe even using as to map the tags to the column names??
The primary thing is that I dont want to parse the XML in my code, I'd like MySql to handle this. I dont have a file, I have the XML as a string.
I have looked and found there are some XML Functions:
12.11. XML Functions
The XML functions can do XPath, but I think this is a little fiddly as I have a 1:1 mapping from the XML to the table structure so I'd hjst like to be able to say hey MySql, insert the values in the xml string in to the table.
Is this possible?

In a nutshell, No.
What your looking for is an XML storage engine for MySQL. There has never been one created officially, and i have never seen a third party one either (but feel free to google).
If you really want to achieve this, then the closest you would get is to look for an alternative (R)DMS, but then that might not support the type of queries you wish to perform, may require a bit of a learning curve, would no doubt require you are using a server with superuser access, and potentially mean re-factoring a lot of your code.

Related

How to convert XML to SQL?

I have an XML file, with a schema defined in it.
The scheme has several nested elements (e.g., Family (root) -> Family Members (list of sub-nodes) ).
What would be the easiest way to break this down to a mysql database with multiple tables? Preferably an automated tool/GUI to handle this process. I am trying to avoid writing dedicated code to parse the file and extract the data, an approach that was common in other related questions.
I am using a mac, so windows tools are not relevant.
mysql has load xml as a command which is quite nice if your data can be formatted to match this specification. It's hard to tell if that would work for your dataset without seeing more.
The first thing you would have to do is create a mysql schema based on the XML schema. There are some projects to do this, but it's worth noting that not everything that can be described in XSD can be implemented in SQL.
You could use XSLT or regexp or an editor to get what you want, then do an import. If you have to use a DOM parser to convert your XML to CSVs to load to mysql, it's not too tough at all.
You're essentially asking how to automate the process of (relational) normalization, and that's very difficult if you're only starting from an instance. For example, if your instance has
<book>
<author>Kay</author>
</book>
there's no way of knowing whether a book can have multiple authors, which would affect the SQL table structure.
If you've got a schema then you can do better, but it's still not ideal because inferring the non-hierarchic relationships from an XSD is going to be pretty difficult. Apart from anything else, there are usually cross-document relationships which XSD can't describe - it's unusual to put all your data in one giant XML document.
To do this job properly, you really need to reverse-engineer the object model, and that requires a semantic understanding of the data, not just syntactic manipulation.

storing complex perl data structures in MySQL

I work on a large perl website that currently stores all the configurations in a perl module. I have the need to move these settings into MySQL. The problem is the settings are defined in lots of variables and most of them are complex structures (like hash of hashes and array of hashes).
My first idea was to use either XML, YAML, or Storable perl module to easily write and read the variables from a simple file, but my boss doesn't want either of these solutions. He wants it to be stored in MySQL, so other solutions are not an option.
My question is, does anybody know about any CPAN module(s) that will help me to do that task; what I basically need is a way to map all the perl complex perl structures I have to MySQL tables.
Any suggestion would be really appreciated. Thanks!
Option 1: Store the data in serialized form (Data::Dumper, Storable, JSON, etc...) in MySQL's TEXT/MEDIUMTEXT/LONGTEXT type field (65KB/16MB/4GB max sizes respectively)
Option 2: Use DBIx ORM (Object-to-Relational-Mapping), which is the way to automatically map Perl data to DB tables (similar to Java's Hybernate). You'll need to convert your data structures to objects as far as I'm aware, though there may be DBIx module that can deal with non-blessed data structures.
Frankly, unless you need to manipulate the config data in detail within MySQL piece by piece, option #1 is dramatically simpler. However, if your boss's goal is to be able to either query details of configuration, or manipulate its individual elements one by one, you will have to go with #2.
Why you don't want to use Storable qw(freeze thaw) with MySQL?

How to convert data stored in XML files into a relational database (MySQL)?

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.

Storing data of files in other file

I want to store file data of a directory in a file. i.e., file name, file size etc so that I can reduce search time. My problem now is to find an efficient way to do it. I have considered json and xml but can't decide between these two. Also if there is a better way let me know.
I'd say that it's up to what kind of data you prefer to work with and to what structure of data you have (very simple as a list of word, less simple as a list of word and the number of time each word was searched,...)
For a list of word you can use a simple text file with one word per line or coma separated (csv), for a less simple structure, json or xml will work fine.
I like to work with json as it's more light than xml and less verbose. If you didn't plan to share this data and/or it isn't complex, you don't need the validation (xsd,...) offered by xml.
And even if you plan to share this data, you can work with json.
You'll need some server side code to write the data to a file, like php, java, python, ruby,...
I would recommend Json file if you use alomst like a properties file.
If you plan to store the data in the file into database then you can go for XML where u have to the option to use JAXB/JPA in java environment

XML file as query data for SQL with ColdFusion

I am developing a web application right now, where the user interacts with desktop software that exports files as XML.
I was curious if there was a way to take the data from the XML file and insert that data into a mySQL database using ColdFusion?
Of course you can, ColdFusion provides powerful tools for handling XML.
Typically you'll need to parse XML file into the XML document object with XmlParse and search through it using XPath language with XmlSearch. Fetched data you can easily use for inserting into the database or any other manipulations.
Please note that there are more useful XML functions present, for example you may be interested in validation XML before parsing it.
If you'll need help for specific situations -- please extend your question or ask another one.
If you are working with XML documents that fit into memory when parsed, #Sergii's answer is the right way to go. On the other hand, XML being verbose as it is, and ColdFusion's using a DOM XML parser, can easily lead to Out of Memory errors.
In that situation, given MySQL and ColdFusion, I see two alternative paths. One is exporting the data from the desktop application as CSV, if possible. Then use MySQL's LOAD DATA INFILE, which you can call from ColdFusion to import the data. This is probably the fastest performance.
If you cannot change the desktop application's export format, consider using a Java StAX parser instead. See my answer from another question for an example of how to do this with ColdFusion. This has the advantage of only pulling in part of the XML document into memory at any given time, but is somewhat more difficult to work with than a DOM parser. As such you will not get OOM errors.
Note, there is a third type of parser available as well from Java - SAX - that has the same quality as a StAX parser of not loading the whole document into memory. However, it's a more difficult approach IMO to work with, thus the StAX recommendation.