x-Persistence Utility
The software addresses the problem of effective automatic conversion of XML data onto relational database objects. Our design approach: saving XML documents as normalized tree structures and provide tools similar to DOM APIs to navigate data by employing traditional SQL processing.
Theoretically document mapping onto database objects can be performed in two stages: (1) convert original document into DOM with subsequent saving in the database; (2) applying the additional transformation XML document for disassembling converted original document onto database tables. Note that the order of database insert/update operations can not be arbitrary. Variation of this approach is to embed information of "XML-SQL" mapping within element attributes. However, document producer and consumer often belong to different corporations, and therefore this variation has really limited usage. At any rate, database tables population is normally controlled by application logic distributed between "pure" application code, transaction processing, database layer, and stored procedures, not mentioning that some tables can reside in remote databases. If the full automation in many cases does not provide real benefits, what can be proposed? Solution: saving XML documents as normalized tree structures - raw tree data - for further application processing. Another advantage would be archiving various XML documents in a repository in a unified format. Technicalities
(2) Utility is built on top of Xerces XML Parser. (3) Database installation: just a few tables, and stored procedures to navigate via database tables as tree structures. (4) Tables can be substantially reused for OLAP processing and reporting.
Applications
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