XML materialized views and schema evolution in VIREX

Web-based databases are gaining increased popularity. This has positively influenced the availability of structured and semi-structured databases for access by a variety of users ranging from professionals to naive users. The number of users accessing online databases will continue to increase if the visual tools connected to web-based databases are flexible and user-friendly enough to meet the expectations of naive users and professionals. Further, XML is accepted as the standard for platform independent data exchange. This motivated for the development of the conversion tools between structured databases and XML. Realizing that such a need has not been well handled by the available tools, including Clio from IBM, we developed VIREX as a visual tool for converting relational databases into XML, and since then has been empowered with further capabilities to manipulate the produced XML schema including the maintenance of materialized views and schema evolution functions. VIREX provides an interactive approach for querying and integrating relational databases to produce XML documents and the corresponding XML schema(s). VIREX supports VRXQuery as a visual naive users-oriented query language that allows users to specify queries and define views directly on the interactive diagram as a sequence of mouse clicks with minimum keyboard input. As the query result, VIREX displays on the screen the XML schema that satisfies the specified characteristics and generates colored (easy to read) XML document(s). The main contribution described in this paper is the novel approach for turning query results into materialized views which are maintained to remain consistent with the underlying database. VIREX supports deferred update of XML views by keeping an ordered summary of the necessary and sufficient information required for the process. Each view has a corresponding marker in the ordered summary to indicate the start of the information to be reflected onto the view when it is accessed. When a view is accessed, its marker moves to the head of the list to mark for the next update. In addition, VIREX supports some basic schema evolution functions include renaming, adding and dropping of elements and attributes, among others. The supported schema evolution functions add flexibility to the view maintenance and materialization process.     

Constraint Preserving Transformation from Relational Schema to XML Schema

XML has become the standard for publishing and exchanging data on the Web. However, most business data is managed and will remain to be managed by relational database management systems. As such, there is an increasing need to efficiently and accurately publish relational data as XML documents for Internet-based applications. One way to publish relational data is to provide virtual XML documents for relational data via an XML schema which is transformed from the underlying relational database schema such that users can access the relational database through the XML schema. In this paper, we discuss issues in transforming a relational database schema into the corresponding XML schema. We aim to preserve all integrity constraints defined in a relational database schema, to achieve high level of nesting and to avoid introducing data redundancy in the transformed XML schema. In the paper, we first propose a basic transformation algorithm which introduces no data redundancy, then we improve the algorithm by exploring further nesting of the transformed XML schema.     

基于关系的XML数据存储

ＸＭＬ正成为Ｉｎｔｅｒｎｅｔ上数据表示与交换的标准,如何存储ＸＭＬ数据是一个关键问题。我们在系统实现时采用了基于关系数据库的存储方式。文章对于关系模式如何由ＤＴＤ生成、等问题,做了详细的探讨。     

S2CX: From relational data via SQL/XML to (Un-)Compressed XML

The gap between storing data in relational databases and transferring data in form of XML has been closed e.g. by SQL/XML queries that generate XML data out of relational data sources. However, only few relational database systems support the evaluation of SQL/XML queries. And even in those systems supporting SQL/XML, the evaluation of such queries is quite slow compared to the evaluation of SQL queries. In this paper, we present S2CX, an approach that allows to efficiently evaluate SQL/XML queries on any relational database system, no matter whether it supports SQL/XML or not. As a result to an SQL/XML query, S2CX supports different output formats ranging from plain XML to different compressed XML representations including a succinct encoding of XML data, schema-aware compressed XML to grammar compressed XML. In many cases, S2CX produces compressed XML as a result to an SQL/XML query even faster than the evaluation of SQL/XML queries into non-compressed XML as provided by Oracle 11 g and by DB2. Furthermore, our approach to query evaluation scales better, i.e., the larger the dataset, the faster is our approach compared to SQL/XML query evaluation in Oracle 11 g and in DB2.     

基于代价的XML Schema到关系模式的映射策略研究

XML作为一种数据交换的国际标准,已经广泛应用于各个领域,如何准确地实现XML与关系数据库的转换已经成为一个重要的研究课题。本文主要研究XML Schema到关系模式的映射方法,通过对XML Schema的结构和语法进行分析,提取元素的语义信息,找到真正的复杂类型的元素,将XML Schema转换为E_Schema,E_Schema表达方式简单且信息完整,结合基于查询代价的思想对E_Schema进行处理,得到最优模式,再将其转换成关系模式,而且能保持原有的层次关系,从而实现了一个更为简单、完善的映射方案。     

基于领域本体和关系模型的XML语义集成方法研究

由于缺乏足够的语义信息,不同模式的XML数据之间很难进行互操作。针对油气井工程中的XML数据集成需求,借助领域全局本体,提出一种模式无关的XML语义集成方法。该方法首先在XML Path路径与领域本体之间进行语义映射,屏蔽其模式差异;然后,按照模型映射方法将XML存储为关系数据;最后通过查询重写将SPARQL转换为SQL语句,实现语义查询。该方法对XML模式进行语义标注,利用关系数据库存储与查询XML数据,能有效处理领域XML数据的语义集成。     

基于演化计算的XML数据的关系存储

随着XML规范的制定和推广，XML数据管理技术受到数据库界广泛重视，XML数据的存储是XML数据管理的关键．研究了利用数据库技术和人工智能技术，为XML数据的关系存储提供一种灵活的策略．首次提出了代价驱动的基于遗传算法的关系存储策略CDGABRS，针对不同的用户和查询模型，产生不同的映射模型方案，引进遗传算法，计算对应的系统开销，从中求出使系统的存储代价和查询代价最优的关系存储方案．实验证明了CDGABRS方法的可行性和高效性．     

基于XML的电子商务数据模式的转换研究

XML已成为数据交换的事实标准,XML在电子商务中的应用越来越广泛。为了更好地利用关系数据库,需要将关系数据转换为XML数据。文中对Schema和DTD进行了比较,Schema模式是XML的首选模式,并分析了Schema的结构和作用,结合电子商务开发提出了关系模式到XML Schema的转换。实现了关系模式到XML Schema的完全转换,该转换能更有效地等价描述关系模式,保证了模式转换后数据的一致性和完整性。     

Using a relational database for scalable XML search

XML is a flexible and powerful tool that enables information and security sharing in heterogeneous environments. Scalable technologies are needed to effectively manage the growing volumes of XML data. A wide variety of methods exist for storing and searching XML data; the two most common techniques are conventional tree-based and relational approaches. Tree-based approaches represent XML as a tree and use indexes and path join algorithms to process queries. In contrast, the relational approach utilizes the power of a mature relational database to store and search XML. This method relationally maps XML queries to SQL and reconstructs the XML from the database results. To date, the limited acceptance of the relational approach to XML processing is due to the need to redesign the relational schema each time a new XML hierarchy is defined. We, in contrast, describe a relational approach that is fixed schema eliminating the need for schema redesign at the expense of potentially longer runtimes. We show, however, that these potentially longer runtimes are still significantly shorter than those of the tree approach. We use a popular XML benchmark to compare the scalability of both approaches. We generated large collections of heterogeneous XML documents ranging in size from 500 MB to 8 GB using the XBench benchmark. The scalability of each method was measured by running XML queries that cover a wide range of XML search features on each collection. We measure the scalability of each method over different query features as the collection size increases. In addition, we examine the performance of each method as the result size and the number of predicates increase. Our results show that our relational approach provides a scalable approach to XML retrieval by leveraging existing relational database optimizations. Furthermore, we show that the relational approach typically outperforms the tree-based approach while scaling consistently over all collections studied.

基于E-R图的关系数据库关键字查询

随着信息检索技术和数据库理论的发展,如何通过信息检索技术在关系数据库中获取有用信息,并使普通用户也可以完成在关系数据库中的关键字查询,成为近期研究人员研究的热点.基于关键字的关系数据库查询系统无需用户了解数据库模式和结构化查询语言,用户只需输入几个关键字就可以得到查询结果.基于关系数据库的原型E-R图,根据意义的不同对实体进行分组.查询时根据关键字所属关系表,确定查询的实体集合,划定查询范围,提高查询效率.提出了新的算法来提高系统的查准率.最后,通过实验对E-RKS系统效能进行验证.     

从DTD映射到关系模式方法Hybrid Inlining的改进

XML正迅速成为互联网上数据表示和交抉的标准,用关系数据库存储XML数据是XML存储策略之一。为了将XML数据存储到关系数据库中,人们研究了很多从DTD到关系模式的映射方法。Hybrid Inlining方法是一种比较常用的映射方法,此方法将多个元素内联到一个表中,从而可以降低查询时连接操作的次数,但同时也存在一些诸如删除异常、插入异常的问题。本文将Hybria Inlining方法运用在从Schema到关系模式的转抉中,同时在Hybrid Inlining方法的基础上做进一步改进,从而解决删除、插入异常等问题。最后给出其具有无损连接性以及锨持函数依赖的证明。     

Converting relational database into XML documents with DOM

The revolution of XML is recognized as the trend of technology on the Internet to researchers as well as practitioners. Companies need to adopt XML technology. With investment in the current relational database systems, they want to develop new XML documents while running existing relational databases on production. They need to reengineer the relational databases into XML documents with constraints preservation. In the process, schema translation must be done before data conversion. Since the existing relational databases are usually normalized, they have to be reconstructed into XML document tree structures. This can be accomplished through denormalization by joining the normalized relations into tables according to their data dependencies constraints. The joined tables are mapped into DOMs, which are then integrated into XML document trees. The user specifies an XML document root with its relevant nodes to form a partitioned XML document tree to meet their requirements. The selected XML document tree is mapped into an XML schema in the form of DTD. We then load joined tables into DOMs, integrate them into a DOM, and transform it into an XML document.     

基于XML的Web数据库技术

探讨了两种将关系数据转换的XML文档的语言描述及其实现技术，一种是利用RXL（Relational to XML Transformation Language)语言来定义一个关系数据库的XML视图，该XML视图的虚的，应用再利用XML查询语言XML-QL在虚的视图上构造一个查询，抽取XML视图中的数据片断并对抽取的部分进行 物化，实现将关系数据转换为XML文档。另一种是利用并扩展SQL的功能来描述这种转换，嵌套的SQL表达式被利用来描述嵌套，扩展的SQL函数被利用来描述XML元素构造，实现将关系数据构造成XML文档。     

SXBP：基于Pri—order编码的XML文档存储方法

随着XML技术的发展，如何利用现有的数据库技术存储和查询XML文档已成为XML数据管理领域研究的热点问题。本文介绍了一种新的文档编码方法，以及基于这种编码方式提出了一种新的XML文档存储方法。方法按照文档中结点类型将XML文档树型结构分解为结点，分别存储到对应的关系表中，这种方法能够将任意结构的文档存储到一个固定的关系模式中。同时为了便于实现数据的查询，将文档中出现的简单路径模式也存储为一个表。这种新的文档存储方法能够有效地支持文档的查询操作，并能根据结点的编码信息实现原XML文档的正确恢复。最后，对本文提出的存储方法和恢复算法进行了实验验证。     

保持数据约束的关系数据库至XML文档的转换

XML已成为Internet上的技术趋势,在保留原有关系数据库的同时发展XML文档是目前的最佳选择,它需要在保持数据依赖约束基础上实现关系数据库与XML文档的转换.这一过程中,模式转换必须先于数据转换,因为现有的关系数据库通常是规范化的,重建XML文档树结构才能实现这一转换.为了达成此目的,首先依据已有的数据依赖约束将规范化的关系联合进一组表格,实现反向规范化,然后将这些联合表格映射为一组DOM,归并成XML文档树,根据用户选择的根结点,以及与它相连的结点形成一个期望的局部文档树,被选的XML文档树又映射为DTD格式的XML模式.这样就可以将联合表映射成一组DOM,并将其归并成单一DOM,最终转换成XML文档.     

Efficiently Querying Large XML Data Repositories: A Survey

Extensible markup language (XML) is emerging as a de facto standard for information exchange among various applications on the World Wide Web. There has been a growing need for developing high-performance techniques to query large XML data repositories efficiently. One important problem in XML query processing is twig pattern matching, that is, finding in an XML data tree D all matches that satisfy a specified twig (or path) query pattern Q. In this survey, we review, classify, and compare major techniques for twig pattern matching. Specifically, we consider two classes of major XML query processing techniques: the relational approach and the native approach. The relational approach directly utilizes existing relational database systems to store and query XML data, which enables the use of all important techniques that have been developed for relational databases, whereas in the native approach, specialized storage and query processing systems tailored for XML data are developed from scratch to further improve XML query performance. As implied by existing work, XML data querying and management are developing in the direction of integrating the relational approach with the native approach, which could result in higher query processing performance and also significantly reduce system reengineering costs.     

以XML文档发布关系数据

本文对以XML文档发布关系数据的新技术进行了综述，主要分析了两种发布关系数据到XML文档的语言描述及其实现技术，以及它们的优缺点，一种是利用并扩展SQL的功能来描述这种转换，嵌套的SQL表达式被利用来描述嵌套，扩展的SQL标量及聚集函数被利用来描述XML元素构造，实现将关系数据转换为XML文档，另一种是利用RXL（Relational to XML Transformation Language)语言来定义一个关系数据库的XML视图，该XML视图是虚的，其它应用可再利用XML查询语言XML－QL在虚拟的视图上构造一个查询，抽取XML视图中的数据片断并对抽取的部分进行物化，实现将关系数据转换为XML文档。     

基于XML的Web应用研究

分析了基于XML的Web应用所面临的典型问题，给出了解决方案和实例，并提出了XML数据库的设计方法。