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Storing and querying XML data using denormalized relational databases

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Abstract.

XML database systems emerge as a result of the acceptance of the XML data model. Recent works have followed the promising approach of building XML database management systems on underlying RDBMS’s. Achieving query processing performance reduces to two questions: (i) How should the XML data be decomposed into data that are stored in the RDBMS? (ii) How should the XML query be translated into an efficient plan that sends one or more SQL queries to the underlying RDBMS and combines the data into the XML result? We provide a formal framework for XML Schema-driven decompositions, which encompasses the decompositions proposed in prior work and extends them with decompositions that employ denormalized tables and binary-coded XML fragments. We provide corresponding query processing algorithms that translate the XML query conditions into conditions on the relational tables and assemble the decomposed data into the XML query result. Our key performance focus is the response time for delivering the first results of a query. The most effective of the described decompositions have been implemented in XCacheDB, an XML DBMS built on top of a commercial RDBMS, which serves as our experimental basis. We present experiments and analysis that point to a class of decompositions, called inlined decompositions, that improve query performance for full results and first results, without significant increase in the size of the database.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, CA 92093, San Diego, La Jolla, USA

    Andrey Balmin & Yannis Papakonstantinou

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  1. Andrey Balmin
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  2. Yannis Papakonstantinou
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Correspondence to Andrey Balmin.

Additional information

Received: 21 December 2001, Accepted: 1 July 2003, Published online: 23 June 2004

Edited by: A. Halevy

Andrey Balmin: Andrey Balmin has been supported by NSF IRI-9734548.

Yannis Papakonstantinou: The authors built the XCacheDB system while on leave at Enosys Software, Inc., during 2000.

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Balmin, A., Papakonstantinou, Y. Storing and querying XML data using denormalized relational databases. The VLDB Journal 14, 30–49 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-003-0113-1

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