Archive for October 2005

XML vs SQL

Oct 17th

Posted by andrei

Now, consider you would have:

– some high-performance XML engine, that can also work with lots of data (gigabytes or even more)

– a XPath-based language with greater functionality and flexibility, and so on

– (optionally) wrappers for the existing SQL code and ADO APIs

Wouldn’t you stop using SQL databases for good ? I give you one very good reason – storing of tree-like structures (that you’ll end up writing lots of workarounds to get them working nicely in SQL databases, that were not designed for this at all). Also, current database engines started to have support for managing xml chunks of data (with sql language extensions) as column types (so basically keep small xmls in records and be able to access their contents) – you would get rid of this and have a nice unified structure.

Using ActiveX controls without hosting on a window

Oct 17th

Posted by andrei

2 comments

You can get rid of the overhead of creating the control hidden somewhere by instantiating the coclass directly. This is, of course, needed if you have to call methods / properties of the control that have no visual effect. There is a catch – you’ll need to get the IPersistStreamInit of the control and send it an InitNew first – otherwise all calls will throw an E_UNEXPECTED.