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Welcome to the minx project pages (formerly known as xmlrep).

minx is an open-source project to create a generic XML repository architecture for common relational database management systems which avoids using any proprietary XML extensions. The unique selling point is that we use the Nested Sets model for storing XML data - as far as we know, we are the only people doing this.

This project started life as a bit of fun / research for me, and it's pretty much stayed that way, although there have been a reasonable number of downloads and some people are even planning to use it in anger (gulp). My suggestion is that the code is of more value as a learning exercise for those interested in the issues surrounding XML persistence, or those just looking for examples of Java / SAX / JDBC / SQL usage, rather than as an enterprise-ready solution - it certainly isn't that.

Incidentally, I'm afraid the only RDBMS we currently support is Microsoft SQL Server 2000. I'd much rather go PostgreSQL, but (for my sins) I happen to have a lot of commercial programming experience with SQL Server; so I thought I'd start with that, and then migrate from there. A mySQL version would also be nice, but until mySQL supports Stored Procedures and Logical Transactions it would mean quite a substantial re-write.

To download the current version of minx, or to view the project group pages, click here.

I have a new release of minx half-finished. It handles namespaces better, it tokenises namespace, element and attribute names (giving reasonable compression), plus we've got a basic DOM API. However, I only get a chance to work on minx in my spare time as I need to earn money, so I'm afraid the new version might not be available for a little while longer yet, perhaps early 2003. If you're desperate for it, or would like to get involved to make it happen quicker, please drop me a line to minx-enquiries@open-school.net

In the meantime, there are some journal articles and presentations available here. The most thorough and up-to-date description I've yet written regarding the minx architecture will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming Addison-Wesley book XML Data Management (due early 2003, edited by Akmal Chaudhri).