Progress DataDirect discovers XML
As a general rule, if you want DBMS drivers, your first call should be to Progress DataDirect. They’ve been the dominant vendor (under multiple names and ownerships) of both ODBC and JDBC drivers, essentially since those standards’ respective inventions. (Persistent Systems Private Ltd. — better known as PSPL — wouldn’t be a terrible choice for your second call).
DataDirect seems to have introduced XQuery drivers last fall. I don’t have a lot of detail on those, however, because the DataDirect guy who contacted me did so mainly to show off a nice toy, Stylus Studio. StylusS tudio is an XML query-building toolkit, available for online purchase for $800 or less. A lot of the users seem to be system integrators. Sales are split 50-50 between the DataDirect regular salesforce and online, apparently mainly from their own store, but I got the sense we’re not talking about huge numbers yet.
In usability when they demoed it to me it looked on a par with Cognos Improptu (a SQL query-building tool) circa the mid-1990s. But they do claim all the right things in round-trip code generation and so on.
Applications seem to be concentrated in intercompany information exchange, based on both legacy EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and more modern web services. Other uses they cited were parsing web server logs and publishing relational data to a web page.
The technology/product seems to have bounced around for a while, from Object Design (OODBMS pioneer that took a premature shot at the XML database business, and the source of the ObjectStore technology I keep writing about in this blog) to eXcelon (merger partner for ODS, eventually bought by Progress), to Progress’s Sonic Software Division, and now to DataDirect after Progress bought them. Apparently none of those companies have or had top-end UI expertise …
If you want to get a better feel for XQuery, you could do worse than to play with this tool. For example, it’s what I think I’ll use in the unlikely case I ever get around to parsing the SpamAssassin add-ins to my email messages and trying to understand what SpamAssassin is and isn’t doing.
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