This document gives you brief answers to the following questions about Tamino:
Tamino XML Server is a high performance data management platform. Tamino is based upon XML and other open standard internet technologies and helps with finding and managing any type of content across the enterprise. Using Tamino XML Server is of importance for companies implementing platform-independent business-to-business collaboration strategies in mission-critical environments. Its performance, its query capabilities and its flexibility save a considerable amount of time as well as development and operational cost that would otherwise be spent for adapting traditional, yet XML-enabled solutions (RDBMS) to work effectively in an XML environment.
XML is the most important technology for Web-enabled infrastructures. XML's world wide acceptance comes from various important roles it plays for the Internet:
It is a universal standard for structured data.
XML is the underlying technology for all web service implementations and SOA (service oriented architecture) systems.
It supports "MOM" capabilities (messaging oriented middleware) based on XML's inherent extensibility and robustness. XML's MOM features allow for easy adaptation to changing business needs and flexible exchange of information between diverse IT systems.
Through XML's "POP" capabilities (presentation oriented publishing) content is separated from presentation. Thus, XML is ideally suited for creating and maintaining information only once, yet presenting it dynamically in a multiplicity of output formats and on a variety of display devices.
As electronic business evolves, XML is playing a further important role for businesses that have to cope with increasing volumes of exchanged data and business documents.
What is required is obviously an efficient storage format (native XML) for all information coded in XML. Tamino XML Server is the first commercial server providing these highly efficient native XML storage capabilities.
Storing XML data natively has an enormous advantage over relational database management systems (RDBMSs), because no extra data conversion layer is required as, for example, needed for XML-enabled RDBMSs and the document structure is kept intact. Relational database management systems (RDBMS) may appear to be a possible choice to facilitate the exchange of XML objects. But the table-based data model of the RDBMS does not suit the hierarchical and interconnected nature of XML objects. An RDBMS would need to break an XML document down into a multitude of interrelated tables. A query against this database would result in many relational retrieval and join operations, requiring high processing power to overcome a considerable degradation of performance.
In addition, RDBMSs and more advanced DBMSs, such as multi-dimensional relational databases or object-oriented databases, cannot handle data with dynamic structure, which is the key to XML's extensibility. A native XML data store must be able to store and retrieve any well-formed XML document, even if schema information (DTD or XML Schema) of the document is not available. An RDBMS, however, needs schema definitions for each table, so a document with an unknown tag would require a change request for a new schema definition, to be built and approved before it can be put into production. Likewise, in an object-oriented database a new class definition would be necessary, which is too time-consuming for Internet applications.
Native XML storage is the essential method to avoid these performance limitations that are a crucial factor in the evolving mission-critical high-speed world of e-business. Where data is subject to change or exhibits a complex structure, storage in a native XML Server will give better performance and greater flexibility. Some of the applications that demonstrate these characteristics are:
Content Management: Tamino has been embedded into content management solutions to offer native XML storage. This makes it easy to publish content in different formats to a wide variety of devices.
E-Commerce Audit: As more and more transactions become wholly electronic, there is a need to store an accurate representation of these transactions, the vast majority of which will be XML documents.
Staging Server: A staging server provides an XML representation of information held in a back-office system. It prevents the back-office system from potential overload and from untrusted access, while making the data accessible via the Web to customers, suppliers, and trading partners.
Enterprise Portals: Easy access to content is a vital part of a portal solution, and Tamino makes it easier to deliver content in a form that is best suited to the user's requirements.
For further information on using Tamino XML Server, see the "XML Data Management" pages at http://www.softwareag.com/Corporate/products/wm/tamino/default.asp as part of the webMethods product suite on Software AG's corporate Internet site.
