XML Data Partitioning, Linking and Referencing - Term Paper Example

A native XML database normally store semi-structured data in an object-oriented and hierarchal database or in XML document format. It uses a physical pointer that is more likely to speed the retrieving and does not require a schema to store XML documents. Since targeting data of an XML document is the common issue, XPath and Xquery were developed to intensively perform a query based on the structure of the XML documents. On the other hand, Oracle XML DB also provides a new standard for storing, manipulating, navigating, and querying XML data. It allows SQL access to XML data and performs data processing as well. The idea behind XML query language is to partition the nodes more accurately, store partition information, and use this information to filter the nodes that cannot be contained in the result. Similarly, linking and referencing methods are designed to identify locations of elements, attributes, and text values within a document by means of tags relations positions, sequences, and content.

• • Background Motivation

XML or eXtensible Mark-up Language increasingly gained popularity, particularly as a data format tool, in the information technology community. Its powerful features made it the de facto standard for data representation and exchange over the web. Consequently, because of its popularity and widespread use, XML data began to expand significantly thus an effective data management systems for storing and querying large repositories is now required.

One of the most widely accepted approaches in managing large XML repositories is storing and querying XML data sets through the native XML database. Another is mapping the XML data and queries to constructs through object-relational database management systems or RDBMS. In this approach, XML data are mapped to relations, and queries on the XML data are converted into RDBMS-based SQL queries. The need to efficiently store XML data is necessary to enable fast queries and take advantage of database backup and recovery tools.