As XML has developed over the past few years, its role has expanded beyond its original domain as a semantics-preserving markup language for online documents, and it is now also the de facto format for interchanging data between heterogeneous systems. Data sources expert XML “views” over their data, and other system can directly import or query these views. As a result, there has been great interest in languages and systems for expressing queries over XML data, whether the XML is stored in a repository or generated as a view over some other data storage format.

Clearly, in order to fully evolve XML into a universal data representation and sharing format, we must allow users to specify updates to XML documents and must develop techniques to process them efficiently. Update capabilities are important not only for modifying XML documents, but also for propagating changes through XML view and for expressing and transmitting changes to documents. This paper begins by proposing a set of basic update operations for both ordered and unordered XML data. We next describe extensions to the proposed standard XML query language, XQuery, to incorporate the update operations. We then consider alternative methods for implementing update operations when the XML data is mapped into a relational database. Finally, we describe an experimental evaluation of the alternative techniques for implementing our extensions.