Storing and querying ordered XML using a relational database system

Abstract

XML is quickly becoming the de facto standard for data exchange over the Internet. This is creating a new set of data management requirements involving XML, such as the need to store and query XML documents. Researchers have proposed using relational database systems to satisfy these requirements by devising ways to "shred" XML documents into relations, and translate XML queries into SQL queries over these relations. However, a key issue with such an approach, which has largely been ignored in the research literature, is how (and whether) the ordered XML data model can be efficiently supported by the unordered relational data model. This paper shows that XML's ordered data model can indeed be efficiently supported by a relational database system. This is accomplished by encoding order as a data value. We propose three order encoding methods that can be used to represent XML order in the relational data model, and also propose algorithms for translating ordered XPath expressions into SQL using these encoding methods. Finally, we report the results of an experimental study that investigates the performance of the proposed order encoding methods on a workload of ordered XML queries and updates.