Performance evaluation on structural mapping choices for data-centric XML documents

Abstract

eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) has been widely used as the de facto standard for data exchange over the Web. It is crucial to ensure that the data can be mapped correctly into the underlying data storage format, that is, without any lost of information. The two mapping strategies are structural-based and model-based. The structural-based mapping involves the presence of Data Type Definition (DTD) for schema mapping while the model-based mapping does not require the present of DTD or any schema for the mapping purpose. The structural-based mapping is good especially for data-centric type of data, i.e., data which is structured and can be binded into certain schema. As such, this paper evaluates and compares the performances of two selected existing structural-based mapping via simulation. Two main evaluations are: (i) storing the XML data into relational database (RDB), and (ii) querying the XML data from the RDB. The time taken for each respective process will be recorded and compared. From the experimental results, it is observed that the s-XML approach outperformed the SAX approach in terms of storing and query evaluations for most of the test cases conducted.