EII Suites: Don't Fear The DataEII Suites: Don't Fear The Data

XIP is the only product to embrace the XQuery standard. XQuery is an ugly beast--normally we like standards, but in this case we're making an exception. Still, we must admit Ipedo's XQuery Builder visual tool makes XQuery queries less of a chore to construct.

Ipedo has embraced the XML world and, given its origins as an XML database provider, this makes sense. XIP uses Oracle's thin JDBC client to federate data, meaning that no metadata can be returned. So it was up to us to build federated documents. Ipedo deploys by default on Tomcat/ Apache but supports implementation within the leading J2EE containers (IBM and BEA).

ODBC support is, however, nonexistent. To access data federated within XIP we had to use Crystal's ODBC XML driver and XIP's WebDAV interface. It worked, but it was a distinct departure from the norm.

One thing we like about XIP is its easy mechanism for parameterizing queries (letting an end user pass a value). This is something Snapbridge couldn't do effectively and that was exceedingly difficult for most other products we tested.

Ipedo XML Intelligence Platform 3.5. Ipedo, (800) 601-3962, (650) 306-4000. www.ipedo.com