XML for Data Architects: Designing for Reuse and Integration (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) by James Bean

Product Description

"The book addresses a sorely missing set of considerations in the real world... This is a very timely book."
-Peter Herzum, author of Business Component Factory and CEO of Herzum Software

XML is a tremendous enabler for platform agnostic data and metadata exchanges. However, there are no clear processes and techniques specifically focused on the engineering of XML structures to support reuse and integration simplicity, which are of particular importance in the age of application integration and Web services. This book describes the challenges of using XML in a manner that promotes simplification of integration, and a high degree of schema reuse. It also describes the syntactical capabilities of XML and XML Schemas, and the similarities (and in some cases limitations) of XML DTDs. This book presents combinations of architectural and design approaches to using XML as well as numerous syntactical and working examples.

* Designed to be read three different ways: skim the margin notes for quick information, or use tables in the appendix to locate sections relevant the to a particular issue, or read cover-to-cover for the in-depth treatment.
* Contains numerous tables that describe datatypes supported by the most common DBMSs and map to XML Schema supported data types.
* Unique focus on the value added role and processes of the data architect as they apply to enterprise use of XML.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #964051 in Books
Published on: 2003-06
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
250 pages
Editorial Reviews

Review
"The book addresses a sorely missing set of considerations in the real world... This is a very timely book."
-Peter Herzum, author of Business Component Factory and CEO of Herzum Software

Review
"The book addresses a sorely missing set of considerations in the real world… This is a very timely book."
-Peter Herzum, author of Business Component Factory and CEO of Herzum Software

Book Info
Text describes the challenges of using XML in a manner that promotes simplification of integration, and a high degree of schema reuse. Presents combinations of architectural and design approaches to using XML as well as numerous syntactical and working examples. Includes glossary, index, and references. Softcover.
Customer Reviews

Excellent Book - Excellent Content
This book hit the spot for me. They provide a wealth of ideas and recommendations on how to create well structured, reusable XML schemas, along with good guidelines on the various strengths and weaknesses of different choices. It definitely gave me a lot of good information, and a good feeling for what is possible and what is important in designing XML data models. It's not an easy read, as it requires a reasonable comfort with XML Schema, and the terminology is fairly technical, but once you get used to their style, it's quite clear.

Meagre content disguised by vague writing and padding
There isn't much real content in this book and you have to trudge through a lot of vague and cumbersome writing to get to it.

Here's a representative extract:

"What should be obvious to any practitionaer is that effective engineering of a schema requires expertise with metadata and related data archtitecture disciplines. Wihtout a metadata and data architecture focus, the broad proliferation of nonstandard and ad hoc XML transactions and schemas will be seen, resulting in increased data disparity, integration complexity, and a failure to reduce related technology costs." (page 197)

It also has a very poorly produced index, which makes it far less useful than it might have been as a XML schema reference book.

Excellent resource for my needs
At first I was somewhat skeptical due to a couple of negative reviews. However, I was desparate. The other XML books I've read (and fallen asleep with) seem to be restatements of the W3C specifications. I am a DBA/Data Architect in the midst of an international Web Services and SOA project and I needed something fast. As it turns out, this was probably the best investment in reference materials I've made in a long time. I guess I am not really sure what the other reviewers missed, but this book was perfect for me. I hold mixed roles of DBA as well as Data Architect - data modelling mostly. Recently, I was tasked with trying to determine why and how all of this XML stuff fits in a SOA project, and from the data perspective. Although I've been a DBA for too many years to share, I've positioned myself mostly at the persistence layer. This book really opened my eyes. Thorough, concise, and very focused on what "data folks" need. Five stars were a must for me.