Xdb vs oracle

a245270

I am a little confuse why / when an organization would leverage XDB over an Oracle Database.  We are an existing Documentum customer (WebTop, websphere, solaris, Oracle).  Recently EMC demoed a solution leveraging Process builder, forms builder and XDB.  I wasn't in the Demo, but I was wondering if WebTop, Task Space, Process Builder run ontop of XDB or is XDB an additional database sitting next to the Oracle Database?  I guess my question is when do you use XDB if you organization already is doing xml authoring and Document management with webtop?

Crink

The difference is really how you want to store your data and then find it. Let me enumerate the different ways.

1. You create a custom type and add meta-data attributes in your type. This is a good method if you have unstructured content like a word document that coincides with your meta-data.

2.You can create a Documentum Form Template. In this case you will store your meta-data as xml content of a generic form object type.Saving as xml content allows you to have complex data grouping (nested groups). This is a really great alternative if you have xml content that is complex.

3.Documentum Forms also allows you to build a form that binds to a custom type as well as store some attributes as xml.

At this point I have only talked about storing your data. The real benifit is when you want to query on the data, A normal custom type can be queried with a well defined DQL statement that is very similar to SQL. This is great if your data is organized in a flat structure. A custom type has limitations on how the data can be structured based on the limitations of a database. For complex data you would still want to query on your data. Using xDB allows you to query your data with xPath statements that allows you to query your complex data in your content. So if you are already using xml content, you might as well put that content in a xDB store so that you can query on it.