OracleWebDAV to Compete with Microsoft

The OracleWebDAV standard is a standard Internet protocol lets you implement a remote filing system. WebDAV is extremely exciting for the desktop because it will allow the contents of an Oracle database to appears to be an ordinary .doc or .xls file to MS-Office.

As you may know, Microsoft Office 11 (now in beta) will be heavily reliant on XML formats for MS-Word, MS-Excel and other MS-Office products. Because Microsoft is adopting the XML standard, Oracle is in a position to leverage their WebDAV product to store XML information inside Oracle database instead of flat files. 

Personally, I use an MS-DOS version of the UNIX grep utility because it is sometimes difficult in MS-Windows to locate a document that contains a specific text string. 

By storing MS-Office documents and spreadsheets inside Oracle, MS-Office users will be able to invoke powerful retrieval tools, and MS-Office users will be able to use SQL string-matching commands to quickly locate their documents and spreadsheets.

Andy Mendelsohn, the senior VP of server technologies at Oracle, states in an interview with searchdatabase ?In Oracle , we have now an integrated SQL and XML database, so you can store both relational data and XML data, or you can have combinations of the two. Oracle can natively store XML documents, and then we can extend SQL with what we call SQLX. It basically extends the SQL language to be able to understand and search XML documents as well. And we use XPath, the standard traversal language for XML documents.?

For the full story, including a great interview with Oracle?s Andy Mendelsohn, see the full article on Searchdatabase.com:

http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid13_gci894098,00.html