Database future debated [IDG InfoWorld] brings up a few interesting points about what people want databases to do that they don't yet do. I have been struggling with this problem myself for the last five years or more.
Relational databases have not changed too much since the 1970's. They have been extended with the ability to store objects and other such things, but for the most part they remain unchanged. Unfortunately, the database object model has not been highly adopted in much of the development community and is even very much misunderstood.
Ultimately, nearly every development project these days is written in an Object Oriented programming language. The task of converting data between objects in your programming language of choice, and relational tables can be very frustrating. The two paradigms are sufficiently different to make the task time consuming and error prone. XML databases are a potential solution.
The main thing XML databases would do for many of the projects I've worked on, is to allow storage of polymorphic and sub classed objects. This is something that is difficult to achieve with pure relational databases. For those non-programmers out there, what that means is that relational databases have fixed column names. So, you have to know ahead of time all of the fields that will be needed by objects that you are programming with. To add new fields can sometimes introduce errors. Polymorphic objects and sub classed objects give programmers the ability to add new fields as needed. XML databases would allow programmers to add new fields to their objects without any modifications to the database. To me, that's a big win.
The debate will continue. Part of the problem is that this is not a one-size-fits-all problem. Different developers perceive different needs. Most people’s expectations are guided by what they are used to, and they are used to relational databases. My guess is that relational databases will be around for a long time, and will probably run side-by-side with XML based databases.
10:23:04 AM 
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