Abstract

Recently, the database research literature has seen an explosion of publications with the goal of using an RDBMS to store and/or query XML data. The problems addressed and solved in this area are diverse. This diversity renders it di#cult to know how the various results presented fit together, and even makes it hard to know what open problems remain. As a first step to rectifying this situation, we present a classification of the problem space and discuss how almost 40 papers fit into this classification. As a result of this study, we find that some basic questions are still open. In particular, for the XML publishing of relational data and for "schema-based" shredding of XML documents into relations, there is no published algorithm for translating even simple path expression queries (with the // axis) into SQL when the XML schema is recursive.