Model for Dynamic and Hierarchical Data Repository in Relational Database

The aim of this research is to build an open schema model for digital sources repository in the relational database. It required us to develop a few advanced techniques. One of them was to keep and maintain a hierarchical data structure pushed into the repository. The second was to create constraints on any hierarchical level that allow enforcing data integrity and consistency. The created solution is mainly based on a JSON as a native column type, which was designed for holding open schema documents. In this paper, we present the model for any repository that uses hierarchical dynamic data. Additionally, we include a structure for normalizing input and description for data to keep all the model assumptions. We compared our solution with well-known open schema model -- Entity-Attribute-Value -- in the scope of saving data and querying about relationship and content from structure. Results have shown that we achieved improvement in both performance and disk space usage, although we extended our model with a few new features that the previous model does not include. The techniques developed in this research can be applied in every domain where hierarchical dynamic data is required, as demonstrated by the digital book repository that we have presented