Category: Howto

July 11

Sometimes you will want to load data from huge XML files into the database. So how do you achieve this?

There are more then one ways to achieve this, but most of the time a “SAX parser” is used. The term on Wikipedia for SAX is:

A Simple API for XML (SAX) is a serial access parser API for XML. SAX provides a mechanism for reading data from an XML document. It is a popular alternative to the Document Object Model (DOM).

The disadvantage sometimes of using DOM is that it uses to much resources in the sense of CPU and memory and for really huge files this method simply will not work in terms of performance. Parsing an XML document with DOM acquires the whole document to be loaded into memory before processing can be started. Via SAX only a small memory footprint is needed.

July 8

I noticed that when I wanted to do some tests with the 11g Native Database Web Service (again), NDWS for short, that I had to gather the information from all over the place on my site. Which was not so very handy. So here a short intro how to set it up, configure and deploy it, also based on the OTN XMLDB Forum example from Mark Drake.

Overview

In short you will have to do the following steps:

  1. Install Oracle XMLDB
  2. Enable the Protocol Server for HTTP access
  3. Enable the orawsv entry points in xdbconfig.xml
  4. Create an example to test the NDWS service
  5. Test the NDWS service by calling the WSDL entry point
  6. Troubleshooting

Sounds very complex, doesn’t it? But be assured, it isn’t at all. As pointed out, most of it is described in posts on this site.

July 3

I tried to replay Marcelo Ochoa’s example called “Uploading WikiPedia Dumps to Oracle databases“. I noticed that the reference to the OTN SAXLoader Example was corrupted / partially unavailable.

While searching on my local hard drive, I noticed that I, a long time ago in 2006, downloaded the zip file. Although of course, there is no support from Oracle for it anymore, at least I would expect it tbo unsupported because of the very outdated example, I made it available here for people who still can use it and are in need for an SAX loader example with which will able you to import / load very huge XML files into the database.

The OTN XML DB Sample had once the following available: