News

DataDirect Issues 3.1 Versions of XML Products

• By Kurt Mackie
• December 5, 2007

Improvements fall in three categories, according to an announcement issued by the Boston-based company. There is added support for healthcare industry data exchange standards. The number of databases supported has been expanded. Also, new document formats are addressed.

The XML Converters product, which is an XQuery plug-in, consists of Java and .NET components for accessing non-XML files, such as "EDI [electronic data interchange], flat files and other legacy formats," according to DataDirect's announcement.

Version 3.1 of the XML Converters product now supports the Health Level Seven standard (from the current 2.5 release to draft version 2.1). Having HL7 capability, which describes the exchange of healthcare data, will "encourage interoperability in healthcare's clinical and administrative systems," according to Dr. Carlo Innocenti, DataDirect's XML program manager, as stated in the announcement.

Version 3.1 of DataDirect XQuery product now supports both the Enterprise and Community Editions of MySQL Server. Other databases supported by the new release include Oracle 11g, Informix and PostgreSQL.

The new XQuery release addresses three relatively new document formats, according to DataDirect's announcement. It supports the open source OpenDocument Format, which is used in Sun's OpenOffice productivity suite of business applications. It also supports the Office Open XML (OOXML) format that Microsoft uses in its Office 2007 product suite. There's also support for an XML-based versions of Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).

Versions 3.1 of DataDirect's XQuery and XML Converters products are currently available from the company.