Not sure if this is the sort of thing you're talking about, but we recently
did a fairly simple-minded implementation of a general-purpose hierarchical
associative array structure in Oracle 8. The actual application data
(attributes applied to elements) are opaque, the DB essentially holds the
metadata which expresses the relationships between elements(a bit like an
XML DOM). Access was via a PL/SQL package which provided a standard set of
'update' primitives, and a variety of query functions. The only problem
we're having is with the performance hit which comes from using the PL/SQL
wrapper functions as condition evaluators from within other SQL
queries/updates.
Adrian Bowen.
Received on Thu Sep 02 1999 - 00:28:56 CDT
