XML Type vs Inlined Shredding into Tables for Storing XML Documents in RDBMS

As XML is increasingly used for representing and exchanging data, relational database systems have been trying extend their features to handle XML documents XML documents can be stored in a column with XML data type like primitive types. The shredding method, which is one of the traditional methods for storing and managing XML documents in RDBMS, is still useful and viable although it has some drawbacks due to the structural discrepancy between XML and relational databases. This method may be suitable for data-centric XML documents with simple schema. This paper presents the extended version of the Association inlining method that is based on inlined shredding and compares the performance of querying processing to that of XML type method of conventional relational database systems. The experiments showed that in most cases our method resulted in better performance than the other method based on XML data type. This is due to the fact that our shredding method keeps and uses the order and path information of XML documents. The path table has the information of the corresponding table and column for each distinct path and the structure information of the XML document is extracted and stored in data tables.