I am in a design phase for designing a media player for an embedded system. Most of such systems use SQLite/embedded MySQL for data management. How would you compare an XML database used for media player in an embedded system? Pros/Cons?
Thanks!
Add a comment
|
3 Answers
Pros / cons (given the same amount of data):
- XML:
- [+] Should use less system resources for simple data retrieving
- [-] Changes on data would be difficult (need to rewrite entire XML files)
- [-] Very limited data management capabilities (risks of reinventing the wheel for quite common SQL features such as
LIKE,GROUP BY,LIMITetc). However check if you have an XQuery / XPath lib, but I guess that anyway you would be very limited for data writing, tables management, joins etc.
- SQLite/MySQL:
- [+] Possibility to manage data using SQL, work easily with several tables...
- [+] (SQLite only): no server required (unlike MySQL), should then bring less installing issues, consume less system resources etc.
I would then go for SQLite.
1 Comment
Maxime Pacary
Uh, forget my answer... Didn't know that so many "Native XML" DBMS did exist out there ! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_database - learned something today...
Data is easier to update in XML document format than in a database. If your data set isn't too large, give the native XML database eXist a try: http://exist.sourceforge.net/
Comments
"Embedded System" can mean a number of things, but in general SQLite is considerably more lightweight than any XML database. If we're talking embedded rather than portable (as in, maybe 64MB or less of available RAM), I'd also avoid anything that needs a Java environment, because JIT and garbage collection are costly memory-wise and processing-wise.
Sedna is relatively complicated to install and may not live comfortably in an embedded environment.
Besides SQLite, which is a very good fit for the embedded space, BerkeleyDB XML may be an alternative if you really want something XML-based.
