The Design And Implementation Of Loading And Reconstructing Between XML And Relational Database Based On Mapping Markups

With the rapid development of Internet, new applications such as e-business, remote education and web-publication are becoming a vital part of World Wide Web. As a new markup language, XML has become the standard for representing and exchanging data via network. Since its unique advantages such as self-description, and platform-independence, more and more applications use XML to store, exchange and publish information, which brings a great challenge to XML storage solution.Currently XML data is stored in database. The most popular way is to store XML data in a relational database because of its mature technology and wide market share.This paper has designed and implemented a prototype system called MyXSLR which eases the storage and retrieval of data between XML and relational database based on mapping tags defined in XML Schema. By extending XML Schema, it defines different or mixed mapping strategies for any independent components in the XML Schema. Meanwhile, it takes advantage of mapping repository to map XML documents instead of in a hard coded way, which greatly enhances mapping flexibility. The whole system consists of four sub systems: Parsing system for XML Schema with mapping information Relational schema generation system XML data loading system XML document reconstruction systemParsing system is to extract components defined in XML schema and its related mapping information, construct mapping repository and save inter-relationship between elements; relational schema system is responsible for generating table schema in the relational database to get prepared for loading data; XML data loading system is to retrieve XML data, organize them into records and insert them to the previous generated tables. Thus it has finished the transformation from XML to relational database; XML document reconstruction system is to transform relational data into XML form by using mapping repository. In particular, the existence of XML document reconstruction system has not only provided a way to validate the effectiveness and integrity of XML data loading system, but made original XML documents redundant as well.