XML and Databases

This report investigates the many options for storing XML content, focusing on the native XML database option. This report accesses and studies the maturity of current native XML database implementations and provides an illustrative state of the art through benchmarking. Issues such as test data generation, lack of XQuery implementations and proprietary API interfaces are presented along with their solutions. The benchmarking process discovered poor standards compliance, missing functionality and areas that still require standardisation. Native storage was compared with relational storage and it was discovered that relational storage can result in better query performance but is less efficient at retrieving entire documents or large chunks of XML data. A document management system was developed on top of the native XML database that was discovered to have the best functional and performance properties. This was done in order to illustrate the effort required to integrate this emerging technology into an application. The report concludes that it is not yet time to make the switch to a native XML database but cautions that as the technology continues to develop at a very fast pace, it will not be long before native XML databases overcome their current weaknesses and become a comparable alternative to a relational database