DeltaXML Success Story - Managing Change in Legacy Data Using XML

There is an accelerating trend to migrate electronic documents and data into XML. This has many advantages in terms of the ability to achieve results more quickly through the use of standard software tools. Many databases now support XML as a known data type and there is a growing number of databases specifically designed for XML.

A US provider of technical services to a number of Fortune 500 clients, North Coast Software, has struggled for some time to find software that identifies changes in legacy data. The company required a display of legacy data changes in order for them to complete specific actions based on these changes.

They found putting data into XML is not difficult but problems occurred when comparing different versions of data in XML. Recently North Coast Software looked for a solution and DeltaXML was able to resolve their problem. DeltaXML is a product developed specifically to identify changes in XML data.

Greg Peddle, Principal at North Coast Software, says, "We looked around for other solutions and found nothing that came close to DeltaXML. We are using DeltaXML to compare versions of captured legacy data. DeltaXML has saved us weeks of development effort and helped us provide our users with a more robust solution than we might have even considered without it. We could focus on how to present the differences between versions of documents rather than how to determine what the differences are."

DeltaXML is capable of taking any two XML files and finding where they have changed. It takes into account all the XML features for example some data can appear in an arbitrary order. Two XML files that appear to be very different can in fact represent exactly the same information. Comparison programs based on text files simply do not work with XML.

Representing the changes in XML means that further processing of the changes can make use of all XML tools. North Coast developers are using XSL (XML Stylesheet Language) for transforming XML into HTML for display purposes. DeltaXML can generate a delta file representing just the changes in the data, or it can represent both the changes and the unchanged data - an excellent basis for displaying changes. Since it handles data in any order and makes use of keys to match the data sets, it provides a very powerful technology for handling any changes to data that can be represented in XML. As more and more data is finding its way into XML, this technology can be embedded in many different applications. This enables the application developer, like North Coast, to concentrate on the handling and display of the changes because the difficult task of change identification has been handled by DeltaXML.

DeltaXML are exhibiting their technology at XML & WebServices Exhibition in London, UK on 12th-13th March 2002. Special offers on DeltaXML will be available for visitors to the exhibition. Visit www.xmlwebservices.co.uk to obtain your free exhibition pass or visit www.deltaxml.com for more product information.

Contact information:

Andrew Barker, email: andrew.barker@deltaxml.com, tel: +44 7974 230588

Robin La Fontaine, email: robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com, tel: +44 1684 592144

Greg Peddle, North Coast Software, email: gpeddle@ncoastsoft.com, tel: 315-342-8470