Introducing the ODI JDBC driver for XML

As we've mentioned before, ODI uses JDBC in order to access data, so it needs a JDBC driver to access XML data. Fortunately it comes with an extremely sophisticated driver right out of the box. It will be essential for us to understand some of the characteristics and working methods of the driver for us to use it correctly and effectively, so we'll cover the basics here.

ODI and its XML driver—basic concepts

We now know that XML documents contain a hierarchical, nested structure of elements (each of which may have attributes), all of which are contained within a single root element.

We also know that ODI is a very SQL and relational-oriented tool that models things in a very table-like way.

The ODI JDBC driver for XML marries these two paradigms by representing a single XML file as a hierarchy of table-like datastores that are related to each other through primary, foreign key relationships:

• Each XML element (tag) that contains subelements (nested tags...