Updating XML views of relational data

by Mulchandani, Mukesh K.

XML has emerged as the standard data format for Internet-based business applications. In many bussiness settings, a relational database management system(RDBMS) will serve as the storage manager for data from XML documents. In such a system, once the XML data is shredded and loaded into the storage system, XML queries posed against these (now virtual) XML documents are processed by translating them as much as possible into SQL queries against the underlying relational storage. Clearly, in order to support full database functionalities over XML data, we must allow users not only to query but also to specify updates on XML documents. Today while the XML query language XQuery is being standardized by W3C, no syntax for updating XML documents is included in this language proposal as of now. In this thesis, we have developed techniques for supporting translation of XML updates on XML views of relational data into SQL updates on the underlying relations. These techniques are based on techniques for supporting translation of updates on object-based views of relational data into SQL updates on underlying relations [TBW91]. The system has been implemented as a part of XML Management System, called Rainbow, that is being developed at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). We have used XQuery as XML query language and Oracle as the backend relational store for implementation of the system. Experimental studies show that incremental XML updates supported by our system is a better choice than complete reload of XML documents under a variety of system settings.