XIS Lite Tweaked To Manage XML

With its release today of the XIS Lite software, Excelon Corp. is reaching out to enterprises that find themselves light on data.

XIS Lite, a version of the XML database management vendors flagship native XML database management system, XIS (eXtensible Information Server), will enable customers with less extensive data requirements to achieve the benefits of XML at a lower cost of ownership, according to Larry Alston, executive vice president of product management at Excelon.

XIS Lite has all the features of XIS. Both versions of the data management system provide extensible, schema-agnostic XML storage and document and subdocument data manipulation support, including updates and inserts. They also support XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) and XPath/XQuery (respectively, a subset of XSLT and the XML query language) for fast translations of XML data.

Whereas XIS has soaked up a maximum of one terabyte of data with certain customer installations, XIS Lite can handle a maximum of 500MB. XIS Lites price—starting at $995 per developer seat—is a more achievable entry point into XML technology than a full-scale implementation of XIS, which starts at $20,000 and goes up, depending on installation size, Alston said. This is key to Excelon, which has its eye on the small to medium-sized business market.

“As companies increasingly look to share information between applications and people, they are turning to XML as the technology to support the dynamic and ever-changing requirements of information integration and exchange,” said Alston, in Burlington, Mass. “The driving force behind our introduction of XIS Lite is the requirement for highly reliable, dynamic and extensible data management that can be deployed quickly and cost effectively with very little maintenance overhead.”

XIS Lite can scale up to full-scale XIS with no change to source code. That will allow businesses to scale their XML data management setup as their Web services mature and their data storage needs grow.

As with full-scale XIS, the Lite version facilitates XML-based interoperability across .Net and J2EE environments, providing support for XML business documents as the foundation of business applications that integrate systems based on both J2EE and .Net architectures.

XIS Lite is available immediately.