A Generic Load/Extract Utility for Data Transfer between XML Documents and Relational Databases

  • Authors:
  • R. Bourret;C. Bornhövd;A. Buchmann

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • WECWIS '00 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Advance Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information Systems (WECWIS 2000)
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

XML is rapidly gaining momentum in e-commerce and Internet-based information exchange, where its simplicity and custom-defined tags make it usable as a semantics-preserving data exchange format. However, to realize this potential, it is necessary to be able to extract structured data from XML documents and store it in a database, as well as to generate XML documents from data extracted from a database. Although many DBMS vendors are scrambling to extend their products to handle XML, there is a need for a lightweight, DBMS- and platform-independent load/extract utility as well. In this paper we describe such a utility, that solves the following problems: 1) loading data from XML documents into relational tables with a known schema, 2) creating XML documents according to a known DTD from data extracted from a database, 3) generating relational schemas from XML DTDs for on-the-fly storage of XML documents, and 4) generating XML DTDs from relational schemas for on-the-fly extraction of relational data. We introduce a language to describe a mapping between an existing XML DTD and an existing relational schema and discuss some of the interesting issues arising from such a mapping.