Professional XML Databases

Migrating a Database to XML

In this chapter, we'll be using an example to see how the rules we are creating would be applied in a real-world situation. The structure we'll be migrating to XML is an invoice tracking and reporting system, and looks like this:

Our invoice database maintains information about invoices submitted by customers, and the parts ordered on those invoices, as well as some summary information about those parts. We'll create our XML structure to hold this information.

Please note that as we're building up our structure over the course of the chapter, some processors may balk at the resultant DTDs created - specifically those that detect orphan element declarations - but any processor should handle the final product properly.