There is an accelerating trend to migrate electronic documents and data into XML, resulting in achieving goals more quickly through the use of standard software tools. Many databases now support XML as a known data type, and a growing number of databases are specifically designed for XML.

A provider of technical services to a number of Fortune 500 clients, North Coast Software had struggled for some time to find software that identifies changes in legacy data. The company required a display of legacy data changes to complete specific actions based on these changes. They found putting data into XML wasn't difficult, but problems occurred when comparing different versions of data in XML. DeltaXML, a product developed specifically to identify changes in XML data, resolved the problem.

Greg Peddle, principal at North Coast Software, said, "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 can take any two XML files and find where they have changed. It takes into account all the XML features. For example, some data can appear in an arbitrary order. Two files that appear to be different can in fact represent exactly the same information. Comparison programs based on text files simply don't 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 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 powerful technology for handling any changes to data that can be represented in XML. As more data finds its way into XML, this technology can be embedded in many different applications. The application developer can concentrate on the handling and display of the changes because DeltaXML has completed the difficult task of change identification.

Visit www.deltaxml.com for more information.