A new inlining algorithm for mapping XML DTDs to relational schemas

Abstract

XML is rapidly emerging on the World Wide Web as a standard for representing and exchanging data. It is critical to have efficient mechanisms to store and query XML documents to exploit the full power of this new technology. While one approach is to develop native XML repositories that support XML data models and query languages directly, the other approach is to take advantage of the mature technologies that are provided by current relational or object-relational DBMSs. There is active research along both approaches and it is still not clear which one is better than the other. We continue our effort on the second approach. In particular, we have developed an efficient algorithm which takes an XML DTD as input and produces a relational schema as output for storing and querying XML documents conforming to the input DTD. Our algorithm features several significant improvements over the shared-inlining algorithm including overcoming its incompleteness, eliminating redundancies caused by shared elements, performing optimizations and enhancing efficiency. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.