Chapter 9. Working with XML Files

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has grown rapidly in importance over the last few years. It has a strong association with web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives, but it is working its way into all kinds of areas in IT. As a result, XML is often a significant factor in enterprise data integration projects.

ODI 11g is in a very strong position when it comes to XML as it has an extremely powerful and rather elegant JDBC driver that works directly with XML structures, as we shall discover in this chapter. What we will cover is:

• A very brief introduction to XML, just to cover the basics, and to make sure that we use a common vocabulary when exploring XML and ODI's capabilities

• An overview of the ODI JDBC driver for XML and the essentials of how it works: this is important to understand certain aspects of how to use ODI with XML and will include explanations of the most commonly used JDBC driver flags

• A brief look at some of the more advanced...