Does Syncato use DTDs or XML schemas?

No, Syncato achieves it's power by not restricting the structure of the content in the database too heavily. The only real criteria is that the content is well formed XML. Note: this does not mean that Syncato does no validation of the data, it simply means it does not constrain the data to a rigid schema. Data validation and constraint are related concepts but are not the same thing.

Also since Syncato manages XML fragments rather then full XML documents, you should not use any DTD features within your data. Syncato doesn't prevent this in any way and does use standard XML tools to parse the data, however, it's going to lead to unknown results since Syncato isn't designed as a general XML "document" management system. The key word there is document. Syncato basically treats an XML document as if there is nothing that exists outside the root node, thus the term XML fragment is used. XML fragments can be mixed together to form complete documents, but traditional XML concepts like DTDs assume that a document is already complete. In Syncato that is not the case. This sounds more confusing then it really is.

I guess this can be summarized as saying that Syncato generates XML documents by gluing together XML fragments. The documents only exist in complete form when the data leaves the system. So if you want to apply a traditional schema to the data that is the point where it should be done.

A future version of Syncato will add a basic concept of schemas, however this will be very different then current XML schema technologies and is intended for a different purpose.

Posted by Kimbro Staken