When it comes to introducing xml-data into your database storage, you might, as all sincere developers do, at first attempt to take care of proper data integrity checking on import. Since xml is a really powerful but a somewhat complex document-alike data representation, such integrity checking must incorporate proving the document strucuture, as sort of integrated data types, iff you like, as well as the document data, in terms of facets of given actual values. According to the xml standard, xmlschema is the means of choice here, offering another xml-spelled specification layer to achive the two beforementioned goals. Eventually, a given xml-instance will have to be thrown against the xmlschema provided, to assure its integrity (and being well-formed too, btw), the earlier the better, at best on data import already.
The paragraph above is actually not very oracle specific. Any implementation of the xml standard, as oracle’s xml db does, proposes this course of action. However, since some xml operations may become quite costly when the xml-instances get large and the whole dom tree has to be set up in memory, oracle, as others, dabbles at dodging and shifting pricey work to the most reasonable extend possible. You may load xml into the database, claiming any xml-instances are just fine, validate xml-instances only to be well-formed, manage the validation status of xml-instances at your own responsibility and so forth. There is nothing wrong about that whatsoever. The point is, though, it might be a stony walkway to learn to distinguish the maybe from the certain, to establish a reliable check to safeguard your xml data integrity, just as simple as ALTER TABLE mytab ADD(CONSTRAINT mytab_CHK CHECK(INSERT_TS is not null) NOT DEFERRABLE ENABLE);.
Jep, what next? I’m going to briefly discuss the xmlschema / xmlinstance used below and then show what I experienced will happen using the various ways of “validating” the instance against the schema. The post is somewhat lengthy, but do not get frightened, this is for the c&p examples all along the way.
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