Updating XML views

by Wang, Ling.

Update operations over XML views are essential for applications using XML views. In this dissertation work, we provide scalable solutions to support updating through XML views defined over relational databases. Especially we focus on the update-public semantic, where updates are always public (made to the public database), and the update-local semantic, where update effects are first kept local and then made public as and when required. Towards this, we propose the clean extended-source theory for determining whether a correct view update translation exists, which then serves as a theoretical foundation for us to design practical XML view updating algorithms. Under update-public semantic, state-of-the-art view updating work focus on identifying the correct update translation purely on the data. We instead take a schema-centric solution, which utilizes the schema of the underlying source to effectively prune updates that are guaranteed to be not translatable and pass updates that are guaranteed to be translatable directly to the SQL engine. Only those updates that could not be classified ii using schema knowledge are finally analyzed by examining the data. This required data-level check is further optimized under schema guidance to prune the search space for finding a correct translation. As the first work addressing the update-local semantic, we propose a practical framework, called LoGo. LoGo Localizes the view update translation, while preserves the properties of views being side-effect free and updates being always updatable. LoGo also supports on-demand merging of the local database of the subject view into the public database (also called global database), while still guaranteeing the subject view being free of side effects. A flexible synchronization service is provided in LoGo that enables all other views defined over the same public database to be refreshed, i.e., synchronized with the publically committed changes, if so desired. Further, given that XML is an ordered data model, we propose an ordersensitive solution named O-HUX to support XML view updating with order. We have implemented the algorithms, along with respective optimization techniques. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed services, and highlight its performance characteristics. iii