Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Integrating XML and Relational Database Systems

  • Published:
World Wide Web Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Relational databases get more and more employed in order to store the content of a web site. At the same time, XML is fast emerging as the dominant standard at the hypertext level of web site management describing pages and links between them. Thus, the integration of XML with relational database systems to enable the storage, retrieval, and update of XML documents is of major importance. Data model heterogeneity and schema heterogeneity, however, make this a challenging task. In this respect, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, a comparison of concepts available in XML schema specification languages and relational database systems is provided. Second, basic kinds of mappings between XML concepts and relational concepts are presented and reasonable mappings in terms of mapping patterns are determined. Third, design alternatives for integrating XML and relational database systems are examined and X-Ray, a generic approach for integrating XML with relational database systems is proposed. Finally, an in-depth evaluation of related approaches illustrates the current state of the art with respect to the design goals of X-Ray.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. S. Abiteboul, P. Buneman, and D. Suciu, Data on the Web: From Relations to Semistructured Data and XML, Morgan Kaufmann, 2000.

  2. S. W. Ambler, “Mapping objects to relational data,” Ambysoft White Paper, 2003, http://www. ambysoft.com/mappingObjects.html [last access 2003–08–07].

  3. S. Amer-Yahia, and D. Srivastava, “A mapping schema and interface for XML stores,” in Fourth ACMCIKM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM'02), Virginia, November 2002.

  4. S. Amer-Yahia, M. Fernandez, R. Greer, and D. Srivastava, “Logical and physical support for heterogeneous data,” in Eleventh Int. ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'02), Virginia, November 2002.

  5. P. Atzeni, S. Ceri, S. Paraboschi, and R. Torlone, Database Systems - Concepts, Languages and Architectures, McGraw Hill, 1999.

  6. S. E. Benham, “IBM XML-enabled data management product architecture and technology,” in XML Data Management, Native XML and XML-Enable Database Systems, A. B. Chaudhri, A. Rashid, and R. Zicari (eds.), Addison-Wesley, 2003.

  7. T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, U. C. Irvine, and L. Masinter, “Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): generic syntax,” Network Working Group, August 1998, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt [last access 2003–08–07].

  8. P. A. Bernstein, A. Y. Halevy, and R. A. Pottinger, “A vision for management of complex models,” ACM SIGMOD Record 29(4), 2000.

  9. P. Bohannon, J. Freire, J. Haritsa, M. Ramanath, R. Prasan, and J. Simeon, “Bridging the XML-relational divide with LegoDB: a demonstration,” in Proceedings of ICDE, 2003.

  10. R. Bourret, “XML and databases,” http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLAndDatabases. htm, 2003 [last access 2003–08–07].

  11. R. Bourret, C. Bornhövd, and A. P. Buchmann, “A generic load/extract utility for data transfer between XML documents and relational databases,” in 2nd Int. Workshop on Advanced Issues of EC and Web-Based Information Systems (WECWIS), San Jose, CA, June 2000.

  12. V. Braganholo, S. Davidson, and C. Heuser, “On the updatability of XML views over relational databases,” in Proc. of the 6th Int. Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), San Diego, CA, June 2003.

  13. M. Carey, D. Florescu, Z. Ives, Y. Lu, J. Shanmugasundaram, E. Shekita, and S. Subramanian, “XPERANTO: publishing object-relational data as XML,” in Proc. of the Third International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD, Dallas, TX, May 2000.

  14. R. G. G. Cattell and D. K. Barry (eds.), The Object Data Standard: ODMG 3.0, Morgan Kaufmann, January 2000.

  15. S. Ceri, P. Fraternali, and S. Paraboschi, “Design principles for data-intensive web sites,” ACM SIGMOD Record 24(1), 1999.

  16. S. Ceri, P. Fraternali, and S. Paraboschi, “XML: current developments and future challenges for the database community,” in Proc. of the 7th Int. Conf. on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), Konstanz, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1777, Springer, 2000.

  17. D. Chamberlin, J. Robie, and D. Florescu, Quilt: An XML Query Language for Heterogeneous Data Sources, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, December 2000.

  18. E. F. Codd, “Missing information (applicable and inapplicable) in relational databases,” SIGMOD RECORD 15(4), 1986.

  19. A. Deutsch, M. F. Fernandez, and D. Suciu, “Storing semistructured data in relations,” in Workshop on Query Processing for Semistructured Data and Non-Standard Data Formats, Jerusalem, January 1999.

  20. A. Deutsch, M. F. Fernandez, and D. Suciu, “Storing semistructured data with STORED,” in Proc. of the Int. ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, Philadelphia, PA, June 1999.

  21. A. Deutsch and V. Tannen, “Reformulation of XML queries and constraints,” in Proc. of the 9th Interna-tional Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), Siena, Italy, January 2003.

  22. A. Deutsch and V. Tannen, “MARS: a system for publishing XML from mixed and redundant storage,” in Proc. of the 29th Int. Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Berlin, Germany, 2003.

  23. G. Ehmayer, G. Kappel, and S. Reich, “Connecting databases to the web - a taxonomy of gateways,” in Proc. of the 8th Int. Conf. on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), Toulouse, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1308, Springer, September 1997.

  24. A. Eisenberg and J. Melton, “SQL/XML is making good progress,” SIGMOD Record 31(2), 2002.

  25. M. F. Fernandez, W.-C. Tan, and D. Suciu, “SilkRoute: Trading between relations and XML,” in Proc. of the 9th Int. World Wide Web Conf. (WWW), Amsterdam, May 2000.

  26. M. F. Fernandez, Y. Kadiyska, A. Morishima, D. Suciu, and W.-C. Tan, “SilkRoute: a framework for publishing relational data in XML,” ACM Transactions on Database Technology 27(4), 2002.

  27. D. Florescu, A. Levy, and A. Mendelzon, “Database techniques for the world wide web: a survey,” ACM SIGMOD Record 27(3), 1998.

  28. D. Florescu and D. Kossmann, “Storing and querying XML data using an RDBMS,” IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 22(3), Special Issue on XML, 1999.

  29. J. Funderburk, G. Kiernan, J. Shanmugasundaram, E. Shekita, and C. Wei, “XTABLES: bridging relational technology and XML,” IBM Systems Journal 41(4), 2002.

  30. R. Goldman, J. McHugh, and J. Widom, “From semistructured data to XML: migrating the Lore data model and query language,” in Proc. of the 2nd Int. Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), Philadelphia, PA, June, 1999.

  31. Ch. Hiebl, “Implementation of a declarative query and data manipulation language for X-Ray,” Master thesis, Department of Information Systems, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  32. U. Hohenstein, “Supporting XML in Oracle9i. XML data management,” in Native XML and XML-Enable Database Systems, A. B. Chaudhri, A. Rashid, and R. Zicari (eds.), Addison Wesley, 2003.

  33. IBM, alphaWorks, “XML Data Mediator,” www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/XI [last access 2003– 08–07].

  34. IBM, alphaWorks, “XML for tables,” www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xtable[last access 2003– 08–07].

  35. Infonyte XML database, http://www.infonyte.com [last access 2003–08–07].

  36. L. Khan, Q. Chen, and Y. Rao, “A comparative study of storing XML data in relational database manage-ment systems,” in Proc. of International Conference on Internet Computing, Las Vegas, NV, June 2002, pp. 277–282.

  37. C.-C. Kanne and G. Moerkotte, “Efficient storage of XML data,” in Proc. of the 16th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering (ICDE), San Diego, March 2000.

  38. G. Kappel, S. Preishuber, E. Pröll, S. Rausch-Schott, W. Retschitzegger, R. R. Wagner, and Ch. Gierlinger, “COMan - coexistence of object-oriented and relational technology,” in Proc. of the 13th Int. Conf. on the Entity-Relationship Approach (ER), Manchester, December 1994.

  39. G. Kappel, E. Kapsammer, S. Rausch-Schott, and W. Retschitzegger, “X-Ray - towards integrating XML and relational database systems,” in Proc. of the 19th Int. Conf. on Conceptual Modeling (ER), Salt Lake City, USA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1920, Springer, 2000.

  40. G. Kappel, E. Kapsammer, and W. Retschitzegger, “Architectural issues for integrating XML and relational database systems - the X-Ray approach,” in Proc. of the Workshop on XML Technologies and Software Engineering (XSE), 23rd Int. Conf. on Software Engineering (ICSE), Toronto, Canada, May 2001.

  41. G. Kappel, E. Kapsammer, and W. Retschitzegger, “XML and relational database systems - a comparison of concepts,” in Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Internet Computing (IC), CSREA Press, Las Vegas, USA, June 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  42. G. Kappel, E. Kapsammer, and W. Retschitzegger, “X-Ray - towards integrating XML and relational database systems,” Technical Report, Department of Information Systems (IFS), Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, July 2000, http://www.ifs.uni-linz.ac.at/ifs/research/ publications/papers00.html [last access 2003–08–07].

    Google Scholar 

  43. G. Kappel, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, and W. Schwinger, “Customisation for ubiquitous web applications - a comparison of approaches,” Int. Journal of Web Engineering and Technology (IJWET), Inaugural Volume, 2003.

  44. W. Keller, “Mapping objects to tables - a pattern language,” in Second European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming (EuroPlop), Irsee, Germany, July 1997.

  45. R. Krishnamurthy, R. Kaushik, and J. Naughton, “XML-SQL query translation literature: the state of the art and open problems,” in The First XML Database Symposium (XSym03), held in conjunction with VLDB2003, Berlin, September 2003.

  46. I. Manolescu, D. Florescu, D. Kossmann, F. Xhumari, and D. Olteanu, “Agora: living with XML and relational,” in Proc. of the 26th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Cairo, Egypt, 2000.

  47. I. Manolescu, D. Florescu, and D. Kossmann, “Answering XML queries over heterogeneous data sources,” in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Roma, Italy, 2001.

  48. D. Obasanjo and S. B. Navathe, “A proposal for an XML data definition and manipulation language,” in Proc. of the Workshop on Efficiency and Effectiveness of XML Tools and Techniques and Data Integration over the Web (EEXTT), in conjunction with VLDB 2002, Honkong, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2590, Springer, 2002.

  49. Poet Software Corporation, www.poet.com [last access 2003–08–07].

  50. B. Pröll, H. Sighart, W. Retschitzegger, and H. Starck, “Ready for prime time - pre-generation of web pages in TIScover,” in Proc. of the 8th Int. ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Kansas City, MS, November 1999.

  51. M. Ramanath, J. Freire, J. Haritsa, and P. Roy, “Searching for efficient XML-to-relational mappings,” in XML Database Symposium (XSym), in conjunction with VLDB 2003, Berlin, Germany, 2003.

  52. J. Raumbaugh, I. Jacobson, and G. Booch, The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Addison-Wesley, 1999.

  53. M. Rys, “State-of-the-art support in RDBMS: Microsoft SQL server's XML features,” IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 24(2), 2001.

  54. M. Rys, “XML support in Microsoft SQL server 2000,” in XML Data Management, Native XML and XML-Enable Database Systems, A. B. Chaudhri, A. Rashid, and R. Zicari (eds.), Addison-Wesley, 2003.

  55. A. Sahuguet, “Kweelt, the making-of: mistakes made and lessons learned,” Technical Report, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, http://db.cis.upenn. edu/DL/kweelt-TR.pdf, November 2000 [last access 2003–08–07].

  56. A. R. Schmidt, M. L. Kersten, M. A. Windhouwer, and F. Waas, “Efficient relational storage and retrieval of XML documents,” in Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), Dallas, May 2000.

  57. H. Schöning and J. Wäsch, “Tamino - an Internet database system,” in Proc. of the 7th Int. Conf. on Ex-tending Database Technology (EDBT), Konstanz, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1777, Springer, 2000.

  58. M. Schrefl, M. Bernauer, E. Kapsammer, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, and T. Thalhammer, “Self-maintaining web pages,” International Journal of Information Systems (IS) 28(8), 2003, 1005–1036.

    Google Scholar 

  59. J. Shanmugasundaram, K. Tufte, G. He, C. Zhang, D. DeWitt, and J. Naughton, “Relational databases for querying XML documents: limitations and opportunities,” in VLDB Conference, September 1999.

  60. J. Shanmugasundaram, E. Shekita, R. Barr, M. Carey, B. Lindsay, H. Pirahesh, and B. Reinwald, “Efficiently publishing relational data as XML documents,” VLDB Journal 10(2–3), 2001.

  61. J. Shanmugasundaram, J. Kiernan, E. Shekita, C. Fan, and J. Funderburk, “Querying XML views of relational data,” in VLDB Conference, September 2001.

  62. K. Shoens, A. Luniewski, P. Schwarz, J. Stamos, and J. Thomas, “The Rufus system: Information organization for semi-structured data,” in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Dublin, Ireland, 1993.

  63. S. Spaccapietra, C. Parent, and Y. Dupont, “Model independent assertions for integration of heterogeneous schemas,” VLDB Journal 1(1), 1992, 81–126.

    Google Scholar 

  64. I. Tatarinov, S. D. Viglas, K. Beyer, J. Shanmugasundaram, and E. Shekita, “Storing and querying ordered XML using a relational database system,” in SIGMOD Conference, June 2002.

  65. F. Tian, D. J. DeWitt, J. Chen, and C. Zhang, “The design and performance evaluation of alternative XML storage strategies,” Sigmod Record 31(1), 2002.

  66. J. Widom, “Data management for XML - research directions,” IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 22(3), Special Issue on XML, 1999.

  67. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “Namespaces in XML,” W3C Recommendation, January 1999, http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/ [last access 2003–08–07].

  68. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (2nd edition),” W3C Recommendation, October 2000, http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006 [last access 2003–08–07].

  69. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “XML Schema,” W3C Recommendation, May 2001, http:// www.w3.org/XML/Schema [last access 2003–08–07].

  70. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0,” W3C Recommendation, November 1999, http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath [last access 2003–08–07].

  71. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language,” W3C Working Draft, May 2003, http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery [last access 2003–08–07].

  72. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model,” http://www.w3.org/ TR/xpath-datamodel [last access 2003–08–07].

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Business Informatics Group (BIG), Vienna, University of Technology, Favoritenstraße 9-11/188, A-1040, Wien, Austria

    Gerti Kappel

  2. Institute of Applied Computer Science, Department of Information Systems (IFS), University of Linz, Altenbergerstraße 69, A-4040, Linz, Austria

    Elisabeth Kapsammer & Werner Retschitzegger

Authors
  1. Gerti Kappel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Elisabeth Kapsammer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Werner Retschitzegger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Kappel, G., Kapsammer, E. & Retschitzegger, W. Integrating XML and Relational Database Systems. World Wide Web 7, 343–384 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:WWWJ.0000040896.89535.6b

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:WWWJ.0000040896.89535.6b

Search

Navigation