A Comparison of the Performance of XML and Relational Databases for the Grid-SAFE project
Adrian Jackson, Stephen Booth, Josh Green · 2009
XML databases have become more common in the Grid and web services arena recently, mainly due to the popularity of XML for data transport/transfer. Many Grid applications or web services perform operations that take data and transmit it to another application or service in XML. If a traditional relational database is used the application has to retrieve data from a database, convert it into XML and transmit it to another application or service, or receive data in XML format and convert it into a format that can be stored in a traditional relational database. Converting between relational format and XML can be time consuming, especially if the applications or services are involved in high volumes of message traffic. Therefore, using a database that stores the data in the same format that it is transmitted in could improve the performance of any service that undertakes these types of functions.