The connection between Relational Databases and XML

This week’s reading is on Database Management Systems, the article discussed what makes up a database, different types of architectures and how these choices inform what type of database would be useful giving a certain situation. I decided to research relational databases since our project in class is to create one.  I found two articles both deal with databases as well as data exchange in the form of XMLs. 

The first article is A Nested Set Approach for BuildingRecursive XML Tree Structures From Relational Databases 

This article discusses how Extensible Markup Language can be used to create better relational databases by organizing hierarchical data to make searching in databases more efficient.  Relational databases currently do not have the ability to manipulate hierarchical data.  This article gives the suggestion that using a nested approach to create XML trees so that more specific data can be found faster and easier in order to benefit the user and streamline the information gathering process.  In the article an algorithm is used to transform a nested set of information to its original XML document without requiring a user to rewrite the tree. This algorithm ends up being beneficial to the user. The user gets the information they were looking for and saves them the time of trying to piece back together the data. 

The second article I found is XML Documents – Publishingfrom Relational Databases 

This article discusses various ways of publishing Extensible Markup Language files from relational database systems. This paper also analyzed possible problem areas that can occur when forming XML documents and ways to avoid them.  According to the article there are two parts to publishing relational data in XML documents. The first part is to have a script language that can convert between relational data and XML documents. The second part is to create an efficient way to convert information so it can be displayed properly from one program to another. this paper focused more on XML than databases but this does also demonstrate that these two are related.  

These two articles along with the reading from the access science show how displaying, transferring and searching for data is all related to each other.  For me these were a tough read, I’m not very experienced on how program software.  In these articles they give examples of coding for XML.  If anyone is doing their term paper on this stuff it’s definitely a worthwhile read.