An open source, native XML database: dbXML 2.0

On August 24, 2004, Tom Bradford announced the production release of dbXML 2.0 on his personal Web site. It's an interesting way for the news about this technology to get out, and I've got to thank Robin Cover for catching this item and publicizing it on his excellent Web site, the Cover Pages.

With these necessary antecedents and preliminaries out of the way, what's the big deal here? dbXML 2.0 is a pretty darned interesting phenomenon, for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, it's a true open source project released under the aegis of the GNU General Public License (which requires that the source code accompany any software issued under this license)—an open technology book, in other words. For another thing, it's entirely XML-based and thus extremely well-suited to storing and organizing collections of XML documents, and can also handle all kinds of complex queries, document transformations, and retrieval operations. It's also been rewritten to use the Java 2 Standard Edition version 1.4 APIs (J2SE 1.4), which means it should compile and run on any platform (and there are a lot o

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f them) where a runtime version of J2SE 1.4 is available.

dbXML 2.0 also offers the following features and capabilities:

In addition, the new release also addresses bugs documented in the first release candidate, including SGML parsing problems, class incompatibilities, context handling issues, and RPC implementation problems (see Release Notes for details).

Commercial licenses are available to those organizations for which the terms of the GPL are not appropriate or acceptable (that is, where sharing of custom code may not be desirable or possible).

Developers interested in a full-featured, royalty-free, GPL DBMS implementation with strong XML document handling, transformation, and management capabilities will find dbXML 2.0 of great interest and potential value. See the resources list that follows next for pointers to information and documentation galore.

Resources

Ed Tittel is a writer, trainer, and consultant based in Austin, TX, who writes and teaches on XML and related vocabularies and applications. E-mail Ed at etittel@lanw.com.