| Since the Extensible Markup Language (XML) made its debut by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1998, it has been extensively adopted by the industries for data exchange in the E-business environment. The advantages of XML not just come from its open standard and scalability, but also benefit from many XML-related utilities like XSL and XPath, which provide functionalities to extend the use of XML. On the other hand, the current IT industry still heavily relies on the relational database technology, which has been around for more than 20 years, for information processing. As a result, how to enable the relational database to leverage XML deployment has became a major concern for all IT professionals. As XML deployment becomes more prevalent, to be able to search for desired XML documents by their contents and structures efficiently becomes urgently needed.; The objective of this thesis project is to devise an XML document deployment and search framework. The framework is devised around Oracle database technologies such as large object (LOB) storage, interMedia, Oracle XDK, and XSQL. Oracle interMedia is a multimedia extension to the core Oracle database engine. In particular, interMedia includes a Text component, which implements indexing techniques for full-text search. The framework explores different options of empowering Oracle for XML deployment and search. To demonstrate the feasibility of the framework, a simple prototype was built using Java, Java Web Server plug-ins, and XSQL with an Oracle 8i server running on an IBM AXI machine. |
