ARAXA: Storing and managing Active XML documents

Active XML (AXML) documents combine extensional XML data with intentional data defined through Web service calls. The dynamic properties of these documents pose challenges to both storage and data materialization techniques. In this paper, we present ARAXA, a non-intrusive approach to store and manage AXML documents. We also define a methodology to materialize AXML documents at query time. The storage approach of ARAXA is based on plain relational tables and user-defined functions of Object-Relational DBMS to trigger the service calls. By using a DBMS we benefit from efficient storage tools and query optimization. Approaches without DBMS support have to process XML in main memory or provide for virtual memory solutions. One of the main advantages of ARAXA is that AXML documents do not need to be loaded into main memory at query processing time. This is crucial when dealing with large documents. The experimental results with ARAXA prototype show that our approach is scalable and capable of dealing with large AXML documents.