Tuesday, December 12, 2006

LOAD XML submitted

I have been working on an addition to MySQL the latest month's or so, adding XML import to MySQL. This weekend I decided that the version was good enough to submit to MySQL. You can find it at http://lists.mysql.com/internals/34169. Good enough to submit yes, probably not good enough for production, but feedback would be good.

But all in all I am quite satisfied with it.
- focus is on easy-of-use, with automatic matching of tags and attributes to field names
- support for three different xml formats: using tags for field values, using attributes or the format used by oth MySQL tools (not a good format, but anyway..)
- works very much like th CSV file load that has been a feature of MySQL for very long

I can think of some additions, like support for binary fields (probably does not work today), better handling of character encoding etc, improved handling of the SET clause etc. But then, there are always improvements that could be made, and probably there are others that I have not thought of that are more important.