A Relational Nested Interval Encoding Scheme for XML Data

Abstract

As XML is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for data representation and exchange in the Internet age, there has been a lot of research on how to store and retrieve XML data in relational databases. However, even though the XML data is mostly tree-structured, the XML research community has shown little attention to the traditional RDBMS-based encoding scheme for tree data. In this paper, we investigate one of the encoding schemes, called Nested Interval, for the storage and retrieval of XML data. In particular, our approach is very robust in updating XML data, including insertion of new node. In fact, the existing RDBMS-based XML storage and indexing techniques work very poorly against XML data update because the XML data should be re-encoded from the scratch for virtually any update in XML data. In contract, Nested Interval scheme does not require re-encoding all nodes. In this respect, our approach is a viable option for storing and querying update-intensive XML application.

This research was supported by the Ministry of Information and Communication, Korea under the Information Technology Research Center support program supervised by the Institute of Information Technology Assessment, IITA-2005-(C1090-0501-0019).