A storage model for XML documents and data retrieval from an RDBMS using XPath

The simplicity and readability of the extensible markup language (XML) has made it a very popular format among users to represent and exchange data. The majority of data stored today are in relational database management systems (RDBMS) that have been refined and optimized in recent years. In order to take advantage of the vast availability of RDBMS several storage models that would store XML documents have been proposed. In this thesis we put forward a simple model mapping schema that stores any valid XML document. The schema proposed preserves the nature of the XML document and allows it to be queried by any XML query language. The XML document is parsed with the help of the simple application programming interface for XML (SAX) and stored in an RDBMS using the java database connectivity (JDBC). The XPath language is used to query the proposed schema. The XPath queries are translated into equivalent SQL statements and the resulting data are obtained through JDBC.