XMap: A Novel Approach to Store and Retrieve XML Document in Relational Databases

Due to Its simplicity, its flexibility and its expansion possibilities, XML can be adapted to multiple domains. Its self-described structure and nesting, allows XML to become the dominant standard for storing and transferring data through the World Wide Web. In addition the relational database systems are mature and extremely powerful. Therefore, many researches have been done to propose an efficient approach to store and query an XML document in Relational Database. In this paper we present a new approach to store and query an XML document using relational databases, which decompose an XML document into three tables without using any XML schema or DTD. Our approach supports efficiently the structural modifications to the XML tree, and achieves lower storage consumption. Also, we propose two powerful algorithms for mapping XML data to relational databases and from relational database to XML data.