Efficient evaluation of XPath queries using relational database

Its simplicity and readability made XML an emerging standard for data exchange and representation in the World Wide Web. ‘How to efficiently search large amount of XML documents’ has become an important problem because of the enormous growth of the usage of XML documents. In this dissertation, we develop a system, which can be a part of a crawler based search engine for XML files. We use the matured relational database technology to help us find a solution for efficient searching of XML documents by providing the efficient evaluation of XPath expressions. We propose a model mapping schema for storing any XML document in the relational Database. The XML documents are parsed with the help of Simple Application Programming Interface for XML (SAX) and stored in the relational database using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). The XPath expressions are translated to SQL queries over the data in the tables. SQL queries are run using JDBC and the results are converted to XML format.