ROX: Relational Over XML

An increasing percentage of the data needed by business applications is being generated in XML format. Storing the XML in its native format will facilitate new applications that exchange business objects in XML format and query portions of XML documents using XQuery. This paper explores the feasibility of accessing natively-stored XML data through traditional SQL interfaces, called Relational Over XML (ROX), in order to avoid the costly conversion of legacy applications to XQuery. It describes the forces that are driving the industry to evolve toward the ROX scenario as well as some of the issues raised by ROX. The impact of denormalization of data in XML documents is discussed both from a semantic and performance perspective. We also weigh the implications of ROX for manageability and query optimization. We experimentally compared the performance of a prototype of the ROX scenario to today’s SQL engines, and found that good performance can be achieved through a combination of utili...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Alan Halverson, Vanja Josifovski, Guy M. Lohman, Hamid Pirahesh, Mathias Mörschel
• Keywords: Database, ROX Scenario, VLDB 2004, XML Documents, XML Format