Synonyms
Definition
From a requirements document, a database designer distills the real world constraints and designs a database schema. While the design process for structured data is well defined, the design process for semi-structured data is not as well understood. What is a “good” design for semi-structured databases that captures real world constraints, prevents data redundancy and update anomalies, and allows typical queries to execute quickly?
Historical Background
There was a lot of research into the design of relational databases in the 1970s, and it was found that the design of relational databases involves a trade off between the speed of execution of queries and the updating anomalies caused by maintaining redundant data when updates occur. During logical schema design normalization algorithms are used to reduce redundancy, and during physical design to improve performance some redundancy may be reintroduced, views can be created over the schema, and...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Arenas M. and Libkin L. A normal form for XML documents. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 29(1):195–232, 2004.
Brandin C. Information Modeling with XML. In A. Chaudhri, A. Raschid, and R. Zicari (ed.). XML Data Management. Addison-Wesley, 2003, pp. 3–17.
Bray T., Paoli J., and Sperberg-McQueen C.M. Extensible markup language (XML) 1.0., 2nd edn. October 2000.
Chen P.P. The entity-relationship model – toward a unified view of data. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 1(1):9–36, 1976.
Ling T.W., Goh C.H., Lee M.-L. Extending classical functional dependencies for physical database design. Inf. & Software Tech., 38(9):601–608, 1996.
Ling T.W., Lee M.L., and Dobbie G. Semistructured Database Design. Springer, 2005.
Nestorov S., Abiteboul S., and Motwani R. Extracting schema from semistructured data. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 1995, pp. 295–306.
Thompson H.S., Beech D., Maloney M., and N. Mendelson (eds.). XML Schema Part 1: Structures. May 2001. http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1.
Wang Q.Y., Yu J.X., and Wong K.F. Approximate graph schema extraction for semi-structured data. In Advances in Database Technology, Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on Extending Database Technology, 2000, pp. 302–317.LNCS,
Yu C. and Jagadish H.V. Efficient discovery of XML data redundancies. In Proc. 32nd Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 2006, pp. 103–114.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this entry
Cite this entry
Dobbie, G., Ling, T.W. (2009). Semi-Structured Database Design. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_338
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_338
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-35544-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-39940-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering