[teiid-dev] XML as a source

[John Doyle]

I wanted to pick up the discussion started in TEIID_817 around improvements/alternatives to the current implementation of the XML Connectors (https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/TEIID-817).  Specifically I want to get a better understanding of the idea Steve presented.
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The alternative we've talked about before is to treat the source access and table extraction as primary and separate functions of Teiid. Executing a web service could have a procedure like xml getDoc(xml param) - which is essentially the approach of the XML Source logic. On top of that there can be helper SQL/XML like functions to map a rowset to xml, such as xmlforest, and the result xml to "tables" - something like extract(xml param, xpath as col1, xpath as col2....). At the very least adding a rowset or table type.
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How do you envision exposing the functions, specifically functions that turn XML into a rowset or table, to users?  Would they be available in Transformations that define virtual tables?  This would retain the central value of the XML-Relational connectors, and remove much of the complexity of how it does it.

One of the challenges in this is that we need to be able to extract multiple virtual tables from a single XML document, and retain (create) the relationships between them.  For instance, if we extract PO, Address and Item tables from a Purchase Order xml document, we need to be able to map the item to the purchase order that it came from.  We do this currently by adding id's to the xml document and exposing them in the model we generate.

One thing I'll note is that passing around XML has it's limits.  Some of our customers are handling very large XML.

~jd