Because XML data lends itself to a hierarchical structure rather than a relational structure, it may be difficult to store XML data in traditional relational database systems.

After the prolog comes the content structure. XML is hierarchical, like a book—you know that in general books have titles and chapters, each of which contain paragraphs, and so forth.

The W3C has published a first public working draft of XML Schema Patterns for Common Data Structures, a set of data types, structures and schema patterns to increase Web services interoperability.

XML structures vary widely in arrangement, complexity, and whether the data is held in content or attributes. A variation of this sample XML is used throughout this article.

That's where the Perl module called XML::Simple comes in. It takes away the drudgery of parsing XML data, making the process easier than you ever thought possible.

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