Efficient storage and query processing of XML data in relational database systems

Abstract

The popularity of XML has lead to a plethora of data that is less structured and does not follow a pre-destined schema. As a result, there is a growing need for data management systems that allow the storage and querying of such data. One avenue is the use of existing database technology. The goal of this thesis is to investigate relational storage approaches for XML data. To that end we present two schema-oblivious relational storage approaches - SUCXENT and SUXCENT++ that provide tremendous improvement over existing schema-oblivious approaches. Among these two approaches SUCXENT++ represents a more significant improvement in performance. We also present algorithms that trnaslate some types of XQuery queries into SQL based on these two approaches.