Performance of Relational Databases versus \ative X _ L Databases Student Name: Anne-Williams

The popularity of Extensible Markup Language (x.mii) has grown with the rise in use of the World Wide Web and it has become a standard means of data ex-change. This development has created the need to store and manage XML docu-ments efficiently and hence the creation of the Native XML Database (NXD). Claims have been made to support the efficiency of this technology with the storage and management of document-centric data over the prevailing Relational Database Man-agement System(RDBMS). This research thus aims to discover evidence supporting the conclusion that there will be a significant difference in performance between a RDBMS and a NXD with the storage and management of document-centric data. Performance is based on the required execution time for a set of queries that im-plement the possible types of disk access. The query set is run on an instance of each database type and query-execution-time is collected and analysed to provide a measure of performance. This paper concludes there is a significant difference in performance between the database types and further concludes that performance, if based on query-execution time, is dependent on specific task, 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the following people: Nigel Stanger for his continuing support and assistance throughout the year Brian Niven and John Williams for helping me get through statistic