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XML in the enterprise: dynamic SQL generation using XSLT. (XML Labs).

Article Excerpt
XML has gained wide acceptance in organizations large and small over the past several years. Part of the reason for this rapid adoption is that XML is intrinsically flexible and simple enough to be used in a variety of problem domains.

Vendor support for standards-based implementations of platform tools and utilities has paved the way for individuals and organizations to find new ways to apply this technology. This is further proof that sometimes the simplest of ideas, in this case self-describing data, are the most elegant and powerful. The majority of XML applications today fall into several broad categories. These include application integration, business-to-business document exchange, and more recently Web services. Additionally, there are more specialized implementations of XML, such as VoiceXML and IBM's Bean Markup Language, that conform to specific vocabularies and have runtime engines that interpret the tags to drive tangible software processes.

In spite of all the hype surrounding Web services and wireless application development, a large portion of new development continues to be traditional online transaction processing (OLTP) systems that form the backbone of corporate information systems. These systems usually have n-tier architectures with a browser-based user interface, some middle-tier business/data access components, and a relational database back-end. That's right, relational databases, not XML documents or XML-derivative databases. There are a multitude of reasons for using relational databases over these alternatives. It is a mature technology, handles concurrency issues well, supports transactions, and boasts robust security models.

One characteristic that most OLTP, data entry-type applications have in common is the requirement to query the database and retrieve some subset of data based on a user-defined tilter. Many of these systems contain millions of rows of data and would be of little use if there weren't a straightforward way to get at these rows. This functionality is usually provided in the form of search/filter pages that allow the user to specify certain criteria. These criteria are then used as the basis for a dynamically created SQL statement that's executed against the database. As the number fields to query on increases, the number of possible SQL statements increases exponentially.

This is where XML and XSLT come into play.

The...

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