News

Updated XMLSPY delivers XML to Oracle DBAs

• By Rich Seeley
• January 22, 2003

Altova Inc., Beverly Mass., has unveiled a set of tools aimed at delivering XML technology to DBAs at Oracle sites.

Altova, which claims more than 1 million registered users for its XMLSPY XML development tool, said the latest version of its offering can make the transition to XML easier for Oracle database administrators as well as developers who may not be familiar with the new technology.

''There's a lot of Oracle DBAs out there who are new to XML,'' said Larry Kim, Altova's marketing director. ''They've been using relational database technologies for the last 20 or 30 years. Maybe they're a bit intimidated by XML technologies. Perhaps they are new to XML schemas. What our tool does is integrate all of our visual, easy-to-use data modeling tools and add a lot of support for the Oracle database. You can design an XML schema in XMLSPY and then register that with the Oracle XML DB.''

XML databases are increasing in use with the growth of what Kim calls ''hybrid data/document'' database applications, such as online catalogs where there is a mix of numeric data for price and quantity, and text for product descriptions.

''They're finding it's not efficient to store all that information in one column or one row of a table,'' Kim said.

Adding XML tags to a product review in a catalog application allows for more efficient searches on keywords and makes it easier to reuse and re-purpose the document for additional applications, he explained.

The new version of XMLSPY also adds a code generator for Microsoft's C# language, a move Kim said can boost development of .NET Web services.

Two additional features of the new release are a utility for WSDL documentation generation, and support for visual editing and generation of XML Formatting Object (XML:FO) code to produce a PDF file from XML content, Kim said.

The new XMLSPY 5 Release 3 is available for free trial download from the Altova Web site at http://www.altova.com.