These days in the web 2.0 era, we are using XML extensively. We use xml on our browser, to represent the hypertext. We use xml in our most recent MS Word documents. We use XML in web services. We use XML in our AJAX applications. To the bigger scale, the enterprise, we also use XML in the service oriented architecture implementation.We fall onto XML as our first choice for universal data format. And also databases?

As a plain text data representation, XML should incur extra overhead for the size and processing time. Indexing XML documents is also another issue, not to mention providing relational data on top of XML documents. Building pure XML database is non-trivial, hence we hardly find implementation for such. However, given all the disadvantages of utilizing XML as the database, is it still possible to do basic database functionality for XML documents?

Fortunately, the answer is yes.

I provide a paper containing my survey to existing approaches to querying XML documents and achieving database functionality over XML documents. Although the structure of the paper may be inclined to academic domain, i think it will still be useful for developer who is looking for quick hindsight for such matter.

You can download the paper from the link below:

XML Query Processing and Query Languages: A Survey (4268 downloads )