XStorage FAQ

Under development

Q: What is XStorage?

A: It is a database, which stores objects as a tree of linked nodes (the same way as XML tree is stored in memory). It provides various API's for accessing and managing stored elements of information.

Q: Who are users of XStorage?

A: All programmers who need:

- to store and access parsed XML data in shared mode with custom security.

- convert non-XML documents to XML and store them for future access

- search across parsed XML data.

Q: Why XStorage?

A: Once XML been acknowledged as an industry standard, various DB vendors created Database tools to store XML data. Majority of these tools are based upon relationship databases with simulation of XML support via predefined list of tables and columns. Some databases provide storage of XML data in a native form.

If your XML data has various structures - you can use XStorage for storing, searching and accessing of it..

Q: XStorage - another "new" XML "bicycle"?

A: Not. There are new ideas for programmers inside it:
- XStorage is not a boxed product - it is API. Product developers can include XStorage features into their solutions.

- shared access to XML nodes - See XStorage Transaction Engine
- multi-level user-definable security engine - allows to implement custom security paradigms through provided API
- XStorage Search engine - innovative way of searching inside XML data.

Q: Majority of XML database engines are quite large. Is XStorage - another heavy "behemoth"?

A:Not. XStorage is provided as a small Win32 API DLL, which can be directly included into existing applications. No need to register in system register or special installation procedures. XStorage architecture allows to use it directly inside desktop, client-server, WEB applications.

Q: XStorage and existing XML standards. Are they compatible?

A: We plan to provide compatibility between XStorage and DOM (Document Object Model). In the moment XStorage is a subset of the DOM. It means that every XDocument can be represented by DOM, but not every DOM object can be represented by XDocument.

Q: There is nothing for free. XStorage speed - any magic performance?

A: XStorage database engine is based upon B+ trees. This provides fast access to the indexed XDocument elements by direct reference to the XNode. This reference can be obtained from XDocument node (child reference) or from XSearch object.

XSearch objects can be used to improve speed of accessing indexed data.

Q: XStorage versus set of XML files. What are benefits?

A: Many benefits:
- shared access - use XStorage Transaction engine to multi-user access to XDocuments.

- multi-level security. Provides granted access through ACL. Any ACL model can be replicated inside XStorage Security Engine (WindowsNT, Novel and etc).

- speed. XStorage stores XML documents in a parsed form. No need to parse from text to DOM for searching,
- increased speed of searching via XStorage Search Engine.

Q: Conversion engine. What is that?

A: XStorage XML conversion engine provides easy way of converting various non-XML regular data into XML form. Once document has been converted into XDocument - various API can be used to access, modify, search, share and control access to the document properties.

Q: XSearch versus MSXML Xpath searches. Which one is better?

A: They are different by nature