Efficient integrity checking over XML documents

Abstract

The need for incremental constraint maintenance within collections of semi-structured documents has been ever increasing in the last years due to the widespread diffusion of XML, This problem is addressed here by adapting to the XML data model some constraint verification techniques known in the context of deductive databases. Our approach allows the declarative specification of constraints as well as their optimization w.r.t. given update patterns. Such optimized constraints are automatically translated into equivalent XQuery expressions in order to avoid illegal updates. This automatic process guarantees an efficient integrity checking that combines the advantages of declarativity with incrementality and early detection of inconsistencies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.