Towards consumable XML databases

Abstract

With the rapid emergence of XML as the de facto standard for information exchange on the World Wide Web, the need for visual query interfaces that can reduce the burden of query formulation and efficiently querying growing XML data sources is fundamental to the spreading of XML to wider community.

This report provides a glimpse into a RDBMS-based XML query evaluation system, called XBlend, which takes a novel non-traditional approach to improving query formulation and query processing. It exploits the latency provided by the GUI-based visual query formulation to pre-fetch portion of the intended query and stores them only to be used when “Run” is pressed. In our experiment, XBlend exhibits promising performance in evaluating XML queries and show its usefulness in life sciences domain.