Comment by justincormack
11 years ago
But XML does not map well to a database dump. A database is a set of sets of tuples. It is not generically hierarchical. It maps to a set of csv files say, as a transfer medium, but it is designed to be manipulated through relational calculus, which is not easily mapped to xslt.
You are using tools not because they map well to the problem space, but because they are the tools you have, which your customers want, and which you are familiar with, but that does not mean they are actually mapping well to the domain.
Actually the XML part is the one that maps best to the problem space. I deal with structured documents (such as part/title/paragraph ... or product group/product/components). The database part (usually Excel sheets or SQL based stores) are the ones that are "insufficient".