searchxml a database´s first light – searchxml the first all-in-one database

searchxml the first ‘all-in-one database’ will be launched soon on to the worldwide market. searchxml has been proven over the years in ‘eresearchCenter’, the leading solution for Standards Management in Germany. Now we take the next step and offer searchxml as a framework for building any kind of content based solution.

It is still the early morning in our product life cycle and we let the first light shine on the most fundamental concepts. We introduce searchxml’s features and capabilities in a series of videos.

Starting with the first part ‘all-in-one database’ , we explain our understanding on how a modern database concept should look like. The xml standards have grown in the last decade to a Moloch. The number of specialists who really can claim to have the knowledge of all xml related standards will fill only smaller XML conference rooms. It seems a bit that the attractiveness of xml suffers from the W3C efforts to invent new ‘Super Standards’ by marry XML with SQL. That the bigger database vendors, who all join the xml query standards committee, integrated xml query into their relational systems jeopardized the initial approach of universality and made a good xml standard a monster.

So what can the strategy of a new database system be, which claims to make use of xml? To use the thousands of pages of the W3C Standards bible as a blueprint is more an academic approach, has been done multiple times and would just address a declining number of XML enthusiast.

Why not put the cart before the horse? The content before the driving technical concepts? The user’s needs before the systems demands?  That’s what we do in searchxml. We present content firsthand not as it’s structural summary, or scheme tree or heatmap or whatever has been invented to make the ugly nice. We show content in his presentable form, as something the database designer might expect as a result of his design intentions. We let the developer drill down from that presentation to the theoretic skeleton, the elements and attributes, the xml pathes and xml queries.

To make complex tasks easy was our development objective with searchxml. We aren´t ignoring the W3C standards world, but we are using it in a more automated and user friendly way.

Both the database design and the application design tasks have been simplified in searchxml. Content and workflow fit together. They go hand in hand and that’s why we introduced an application server for an integrated system, an ‘all-in-one database’  product which adresses a huge target Group from the real hardcore xml developers to the enthusiasts, who all share the same simple needs: to bring content to an audience.

The first screen cast of that new database can be viewed here.

Author: Matthias Gutbier (CTO) informationpartners GmbH.