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Re: XPath -> SQL

• From: disco <disco@t...>
• To: Matthew Gertner <matthew@p...>
• Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 13:36:33 -0500 (EST)

Matthew,

There has been significant research in this area, and to my knowledge, no
*really good* solutions to the problem of "how to squash XML into tables"
have been found yet. Various people and companies with their own pet
projects have come up with adequate methods, but as far as I have seen,
most have had some issues.

For example, one system I looked at had a fairly clever way of associating
semistructured XML data, through either definite or inferred DTDs, to
tables, but had the problem of needing potentially infinite layers of
"overflow relations" in the case of deep nesting.

An example of something I've seen that does seem to work is the X2X
linking tool which was announced here recently, which deals with XLinks
using relational databases, but that doesn't handle the general case of
any old XML -- XLinks just happen to fit well :)

However, once (or if) somebody comes up with a really slick way of
squashing XML data into relational tables, there should be an easy mapping
between XPath expressions on the XML data and SQL (or relational algebra)
expressions on the tables...

Dan

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Matthew Gertner wrote:

> I noticed in the list archives that there was some discussion last year
> about converting XPath expressions to SQL queries. Specifically, my interest
> would be to take a relational schema that has been generated from an XML
> schema of some flavor, and map XPath expressions based on the XML schema
> into SQL queries based on the corresponding (i.e. generated) RDBMS schema.
> Does anyone know of any work that has been done or is being done in this
> area?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any pointers,
> Matthew
> 


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