Exstensible Madness Language

Can't help but admire the guys (and gals) who designed XML. They have made a beast of a nightmare come true. When it works, it works really well, but when it doesn't..., well then the hair pulling starts.

Oracle have provided us with some lovely tools to generate and post XML direct from a SQL query, and with some tinkering with the lesser known features we actually got the thing to work. Now all we have to do is repeat the same thing many times over for searches scattered throughout the system (the consistent scatter-gun approach).

I am seriously considering modularising the entire back-end and giving it a more generic class like structure, though how this will affect performance is in the hands of the gods. My first attempts have been promising (so far), using the database design and key data to auto generate queries etc.... I'll keep you posted.

As for the spatial side of things - well, performance was suffering, as was my downtime, until I found some useful hints from others in the same situation. They pointed me towards some valuable performance enhancing methods for getting the most out of Spatial.