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Chapter: Fundamentals of Database Systems : Object, Object-Relational, and XML: Concepts, Models, Languages, and Standards : XML: Extensible Markup Language

Storing and Extracting XML Documents from Databases

Several approaches to organizing the contents of XML documents to facilitate their subsequent querying and retrieval have been proposed. The following are the most common approaches:

Storing and Extracting XML Documents from Databases

 

Several approaches to organizing the contents of XML documents to facilitate their subsequent querying and retrieval have been proposed. The following are the most common approaches:

 

        Using a DBMS to store the documents as text. A relational or object DBMS can be used to store whole XML documents as text fields within the DBMS records or objects. This approach can be used if the DBMS has a special module for document processing, and would work for storing schemaless and documentcentric XML documents.

 

        Using a DBMS to store the document contents as data elements. This approach would work for storing a collection of documents that follow a specific XML DTD or XML schema. Because all the documents have the same structure, one can design a relational (or object) database to store the leaf-level data elements within the XML documents. This approach would require mapping algorithms to design a database schema that is compatible with the XML document structure as specified in the XML schema or DTD and to recreate the XML documents from the stored data. These algorithms can be implemented either as an internal DBMS module or as separate middleware that is not part of the DBMS.

 

        Designing a specialized system for storing native XML data. A new type of database system based on the hierarchical (tree) model could be designed and implemented. Such systems are being called Native XML DBMSs. The system would include specialized indexing and querying techniques, and would work for all types of XML documents. It could also include data compression techniques to reduce the size of the documents for storage. Tamino by Software AG and the Dynamic Application Platform of eXcelon are two popular products that offer native XML DBMS capability. Oracle also offers a native XML storage option.

 

Creating or publishing customized XML documents from preexisting relational databases. Because there are enormous amounts of data already stored in relational databases, parts of this data may need to be formatted as documents for exchanging or displaying over the Web. This approach would use a separate middleware software layer to handle the conversions needed between the XML documents and the relational database. Section 12.6 dis-cusses this approach, in which datacentric XML documents are extracted from existing databases, in more detail. In particular, we show how tree structured documents can be created from graph-structured databases. Section 12.6.2 discusses the problem of cycles and how to deal with it.

 

All of these approaches have received considerable attention. We focus on the fourth approach in Section 12.6, because it gives a good conceptual understanding of the differences between the XML tree data model and the traditional database models based on flat files (relational model) and graph representations (ER model). But first we give an overview of XML query languages in Section 12.5.


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Fundamentals of Database Systems : Object, Object-Relational, and XML: Concepts, Models, Languages, and Standards : XML: Extensible Markup Language : Storing and Extracting XML Documents from Databases |


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