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.  

Week 6 - Database Management Systems

This encyclopedia entry made me realize how little thought I typically give to how data is stored and retrieved in all the programs and applications I interact without on a daily basis. I never considered the immense amount of structure and logic that allows for such efficient data management. Since I did not have much prior experience with Microsoft Access, I followed through some simple tutorials while reading this article so I could get a better understanding of what I was reading. I think it is very clever how each entity/entry has a key attribute that defines it and that key is what allows for relationships between multiple tables. I see this system as being more efficient then using Excel for storing text and numeric data as it eliminates repeat information by having an entry only listed once and then referenced by an attribute in other tables based on a data model. This allows for all data to remain consistent throughout the entire database.

As the reading assignment specifically noted relational databases, I searched for articles that focused on relational database management. The first article I found, A Performance Evaluation of Storing XML Data in Relational Database Management Systems, was a report prepared by a group that designed a technique for automatically mapping an XML file into relations within a relational database management system. They hid all database detail, leaving a transparent framework for user access to XML data, which is both human readable and machine readable. One of the main issues they ran into was how to deal with information that may appear more than once in an XML document. To handle this issue they developed a naming system for each entry that would pad a number appended to the repeated XML data that would both distinguish each entry as well as identify that each were related in their original XML format. They created a document object model based parser that would extract data from the XML file and structure according to the tree hierarchy they developed for their database.

The second article I found was a patent for a relational database management system developed by International Business Machines Corporation in New York. I chose to read this just to get a different type of source since primarily I have only looked at articles from professional journals so far this term. The patent notes that the extension of relational databases in engineering fields has been hampered by the lack of capacity of vendors of relational database products to provide increasingly complex data types and user defined functions. The system described in this patent provides a method for manipulating user application files using relational database management. The core of the system is a structured query language processor that compiles user application files. I thought it was interesting to read this patent because it explained how engineers and researchers are looking to improve how we manage data.