Numbering Scheme Based Relational Storage of XML Documents

With the prevalence of XML, how to make use of RDB to store and query XML documents has become a hot topic and many methods of relational storage of XML documents are proposed. A common object of these methods is to improve the efficiency of XML path query. In this paper, a numbering scheme based relational storage of XML documents is proposed, in which XML path query can be quickly done. Moreover, with this XML storage method, XML documents conforming to different DTD (or schema) can be kept in a same relational table and XML document reconstruction can be done with linear time complexity. Recursive schema handling is also discussed. Experimental results demonstrate that this method can process general path queries, such as path with predicate constraint, faster than methods proposed by XRel, Florescu and Kossman.