XAO::FS

XAO::FS is the software for XAO Foundation server. This platform summarizes a series of design meetings by XAO Inc. From both developer and management perspectives, it is best to perceive a data fragment as a closed entity with certain content and methods for managing that content. The term usually used for this is an "object." More often than not, this object contains references to other objects or a list of data objects. For instance, a customer object can hold all orders assigned to that customer, and each order object can have descriptions and prices of all products in that order.

It is desired to use a relational database for saving this data since relational databases are fast, dependable, available on a wide range of platforms and in all the price ranges, can be accessed via network, and usually have a variety of monitoring and visualization tools. Also, many people have experience with some sort of relational database, such as MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, or something comparable. Nonetheless, a severe restriction of relational databases is that each table in the database is just a 2D table with rows and columns. This setup is insufficient for naturally representing the above-described data structure. Here, a developer needs to construct a series of tables and include reference columns (foreign keys) to link data rows from different tables into a global data layout.

While this is natural for relational databases (as the name suggests), developers must keep in mind all index fields and table relationships to use the data meaningfully. Changing data layout can be a nightmare too.