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VistaDB vs XML

XML is a powerful technology for exchanging data between disparate systems and VistaDB provides full support for importing and exporting to XML. However, XML cannot replace or match the benefits of using a relational database engine for managing data. XML is a meta language designed for describing the contents of documents, thereby giving some structure to free flowing documents. XML is ideal for storing small amounts of data easily and effectively, and of course, XML is fantastic for exchanging data between disparate systems (i.e. importing or exporting).

While it is true that data can be stored to a flexible XML document, XML is only a partial data storage technicaly since it lacks a built-in mechanism to index, retrieve, filter, encrypt, compress and lock the data. XML by itself lacks any form of transaction processing and offers no support for concurrent read/write access by multiple users.

In summary, XML is simply not a viable replacement for a robust and feature-rich database engine such as VistaDB. The cost of adding any of the features listed above (searching, indexing, security, locking etc.) would far out weigh the cost of purchasing VistaDB. For desktop database solutions XML may solve a short term need to persist data, but it is not a desktop database API and cannot store relations between data.