article

Free access

Efficiently publishing relational data as XML documents

Authors:

Jayavel Shanmugasundaram,

Eugene Shekita,

Hamid Pirahesh,

Berthold ReinwaldAuthors Info & Claims

The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, Volume 10, Issue 2-3

Pages 133 - 154

Published: 01 September 2001 Publication History

Abstract

XML is rapidly emerging as a standard for exchanging business data on the World Wide Web. For the foreseeable future, however, most business data will continue to be stored in relational database systems. Consequently, if XML is to fulfill its potential, some mechanism is needed to publish relational data as XML documents. Towards that goal, one of the major challenges is finding a way to efficiently structure and tag data from one or more tables as a hierarchical XML document. Different alternatives are possible depending on when this processing takes place and how much of it is done inside the relational engine. In this paper, we characterize and study the performance of these alternatives. Among other things, we explore the use of new scalar and aggregate functions in SQL for constructing complex XML documents directly in the relational engine. We also explore different execution plans for generating the content of an XML document. The results of an experimental study show that constructing XML documents inside the relational engine can have a significant performance benefit. Our results also show the superiority of having the relational engine use what we call an “outer union plan” to generate the content of an XML document.

References

[1]

1. American National Standards Institute. The Database Language SQL. Standard No. X3.135-1992, New York, 1992.

[2]

2. Banerjee S., Krishnamurthy V., Krishnaprasad M., Murthy R. Oracle8i - The XML Enabled Data Management System. Proc. International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Calif., March 2000.

[3]

3. Chamberlin D. A Complete Guide to DB2 Universal Database. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, Calif., 1998.

[4]

4. Commerce XML, http://www.cxml.org

[5]

5. Cover R. The XML Cover Pages. http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgml-xml.html

[6]

6. Dadam P., Kuespert K., Andersen F., Blanken H., Erbe R., Guenauer J., Lum V., Pistor P., Walch G. A DBMS Prototype to Support Extended NF2 Relations: an Integrated View on Flat Tables and Hierarchies. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conference on the Management of Data, Washington D.C., May 1986.

[7]

7. Deutsch A., Fernandez M., Florescu D., Levy A., Suciu D. XML-QL: a Query Language for XML. Proc. International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, Toronto, May 1999.

[8]

8. Deutsch A., Fernandez M., Suciu D. Storing Semi-Structured Data with STORED. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conference on the Management of Data, Philadelphia, Pa., May 1999.

[9]

9. Fagin R. Multi-valued Dependencies and a New Normal Form for Relational Databases. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 2(3), 1977.

[10]

10. Fernandez M., Morishima A., Suciu D. Efficient Evaluation of XML Middle-ware Queries. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conference on the Management of Data, Santa Barbara, Calif., May 2001 (to appear).

[11]

11. Fernandez M., Tan W., Suciu D. SilkRoute: Trading Between Relations and XML. Proc. International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, May 2000.

[12]

12. Florescu D.,Kossman D. Storing and Querying XML Data using a RDBMS. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 22(3), 1999.

[13]

13. Keller T., Graefe G., Maier D. Efficient Assembly of Complex Objects. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, Denver, Colo., May 1991.

[14]

14. Korth H.F., Roth M.A. Query Languages for Nested Relational Databases. Nested Relations and Complex Objects, Germany, April 1987.

[15]

15. Microsoft Corporation. http://www.microsoft.com/xml

[16]

16. Pirahesh H., Hellerstein J., Hasan W. Extensible/Rule Based Query Rewrite Optimization in Starburst. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, San Diego, Calif., June 1992.

[17]

17. Pistor P., Anderson F. Designing a Generalized NF2 Model with an SQL-type Language Interface. Proc. Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Conference, Kyoto, Japan, August 1986.

[18]

18. Real Estate Transaction Standard. http://www.rets-wg.org

[19]

19. Roth M.A., Korth H.F., Batory D.S. SQL/NF: a Query Language for ¬NF Relational Databases. Information Systems, 12(1), 1987.

[20]

20. Scholl M., Abiteboul S., Bancilhon F. Bidoit N., Gamerman S., Plateau D., Richard P., Verroust A. VERSO: a Database Machine Based On Nested Relations, Nested Relations and Complex Objects. Germany, April 1987.

[21]

21. Seshadri P., Pirahesh H., Leung T.Y.C. Complex Query Decorrelation. Proc. International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), La., USA, February 1996.

[22]

22. Shanmugasundaram J., Tufte K., He G., Zhang C., DeWitt D., Naughton J. Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities. Proc. Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Conference, Scotland, UK, September 1999.

[23]

23. Shapiro L.D. Join Processing in Database Systems with Large Main Memories. ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), 11(3), 1986.

[24]

24. Shekita E., Carey M. A Performance Evaluation of Pointer-Based Joins. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conference on the Management of Data, Atlantic City, N.J., June 1990.

[25]

25. Stonebraker M., Moore D., Brown P. Object-Relational DBMSs: Tracking the Next Great Wave. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, September 1998.

[26]

26. World Wide Web Consortium,. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (2nd Edn). W3C Recommendation, October 2000. See: http://www.w3c.org/TR/REC-xml

[27]

27. World Wide Web Consortium. XML Schema Parts 0, 1, 2. W3C Candidate Recommendation, October 2000. See: http://www.w3c.org/TR/xmlschema-0, 1, 2.

[28]

28. World Wide Web Consortium. XQuery: a Query Language for XML. W3C Working Draft, February 2001. See: http://www.w3c.org/TR/xquery

Cited By

Franceschet MGubiani DMontanari APiazza C(2013)A graph-theoretic approach to map conceptual designs to XML schemasACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/2445583.244558938:1(1-44)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2445583.2445589
Leighton GBarbosa D(2011)Access Control Policy Translation, Verification, and Minimization within Heterogeneous Data FederationsACM Transactions on Information and System Security10.1145/2043621.204362514:3(1-28)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2043621.2043625
Leighton GBarbosa DJoshi JCarminati B(2010)Access control policy translation and verification within heterogeneous data federationsProceedings of the 15th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies10.1145/1809842.1809871(173-182)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1809842.1809871
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Efficiently publishing relational data as XML documents
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Publishing
  2. Document management and text processing
    1. Document preparation
2. Information systems

Recommendations

Constraint Preserving Transformation from Relational Schema to XML Schema

XML has become the standard for publishing and exchanging data on the Web. However, most business data is managed and will remain to be managed by relational database management systems. As such, there is an increasing need to efficiently and accurately ...
Bridging XML-schema and relational databases: a system for generating and manipulating relational databases using valid XML documents
DocEng '01: Proceedings of the 2001 ACM Symposium on Document engineering

Many organizations and enterprises establish distributed working environments, where different users need to exchange information based on a common model. XML is widely used to facilitate this information exchange. The extensibility of XML allows the ...
INode*: an effective approach for storing XML using relational database

With the increasing amount of XML used in web applications for representing and exchanging information, researchers have proposed different methods of using relational database to store and manage XML data. The model-mapping methods do not require DTD so ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases

The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases Volume 10, Issue 2-3

September 2001

121 pages

ISSN:1066-8888

Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 01 September 2001

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

36
Total Citations
View Citations
1,630
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)44
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 28 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Franceschet MGubiani DMontanari APiazza C(2013)A graph-theoretic approach to map conceptual designs to XML schemasACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/2445583.244558938:1(1-44)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2445583.2445589
Leighton GBarbosa D(2011)Access Control Policy Translation, Verification, and Minimization within Heterogeneous Data FederationsACM Transactions on Information and System Security10.1145/2043621.204362514:3(1-28)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2043621.2043625
Leighton GBarbosa DJoshi JCarminati B(2010)Access control policy translation and verification within heterogeneous data federationsProceedings of the 15th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies10.1145/1809842.1809871(173-182)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1809842.1809871
Gupta ACondit CQian X(2010)EditorialData & Knowledge Engineering10.1016/j.datak.2010.07.00369:11(1084-1102)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.datak.2010.07.003
Lo AÖzyer TKianmehr KAlhajj R(2010)VIREX and VRXQueryJournal of Intelligent Information Systems10.1007/s10844-009-0087-635:1(21-49)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10844-009-0087-6
Groppe SGroppe JBöttcher SWycisk TGruenwald L(2009)Optimizing the execution of XSLT stylesheets for querying transformed XML dataKnowledge and Information Systems10.5555/3225670.322602018:3(331-391)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3225670.3226020
Niemi TNäppilä TJärvelin K(2009)A relational data harmonization approach to XMLJournal of Information Science10.1177/016555150910423135:5(571-601)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1177/0165551509104231
Leighton G(2009)Preserving SQL access control policies over published XML dataProceedings of the 2009 EDBT/ICDT Workshops10.1145/1698790.1698820(185-192)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1698790.1698820
Guéhis SGoasdoué-Thion VRigaux PDesai BSacca DGreco S(2009)Speeding-up data-driven applications with program summariesProceedings of the 2009 International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium10.1145/1620432.1620440(66-76)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1620432.1620440
Zhou RLiu CLi J(2008)Holistic constraint-preserving transformation from relational schema into XML schemaProceedings of the 13th international conference on Database systems for advanced applications10.5555/1802514.1802520(4-18)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1802514.1802520
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents