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Review - Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities.

Michael J. Carey: Review - Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities. ACM SIGMOD Digital Review 2: (2000)

Review

This paper is the first paper that I have read that presents and evaluates techniques for mapping XML documents with DTDs to relational databases for storage. It also presents and evaluates corresponding XML-to-SQL query translations. The paper closes with recommendations for relational DBMS improvements to make them better-suited for solving the XML problem.

My reaction on reading this paper was that it is a well-motivated and clearly explained piece of work on a timely and important problem -- namely, how to go about exploiting commercial DBMS technology to manage XML data (and improving commercial DBMS systems to support this better in the future). The paper has a nice discussion of the problem landscape as well as of the most relevant related work. The authors do a nice job of presenting and evaluating various algorithms for schema and query mapping, though the evaluation metrics are a bit simplistic. Overall, this was the best (and most exciting) paper that ended up in my to-review batch for the 1999 VLDB Conference. I hereby nominate this paper for the VLDB-2009 'ten-year paper' award. :-)

[FULL DISCLOSURE: I was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, where this work was done, for a number of years. However, this work was done after my time there, and I do not feel biased by that relationship with the Wisconsin authors.]

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). Review published with permission.


References

[1]
Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, Kristin Tufte, Chun Zhang, Gang He, David J. DeWitt, Jeffrey F. Naughton: Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities. VLDB 1999: 302-314 CiteSeerX Google scholar pubzone.org BibTeX bibliographical record in XML

Copyright © Fri Mar 12 17:26:56 2010 by Michael Ley (ley@uni-trier.de)