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.