Magnus Hagander wrote: > Terminology aside, why? The unit is "8.1" not "8" and "1". It makes no > sense to say you're on version 8, in the given context, so why should the > XML data pretend there is? Because serving the data in the decomposed format gives the consumer the maximum flexibility to do as they wish with the data. I find it hard to see why, as a relational database guy, you'd want to offer the data as "8.1", "8.1.3" etc. when you can just give the three parts separately and allow people to check whatever they need without having to chop up strings! Imagine wanting to display only the details of the 8.x releases on a site for example. In your schema, you'd have to use a substring match on an attribute value to filter out 6.x and 7.x. Regards,D ave.
