SMX/R: Efficient way of storing and managing XML documents using RDBMSs based on paths

The increasing demand for and amounts of XML documents require the need to store, search and query XML documents efficiently. XML is emerging as the format of choice for a variety of types of data, especially documents. With its ability to tag different fields, XML makes searching simpler and more dynamic. In this paper, we propose a novel relational storage structure which can store and manage XML documents efficiently based on paths using relational database systems (SMX/R). In this approach, any set of XML documents can be stored in a single relational schema consisting of two tables: the first table is Path_Table, stores the paths, value pairs and associated hierarchical information for the XML data and the second table is Path_Index_Table, assigns unique path IDs to path string, thereby avoiding duplicated storage of large path strings. We also propose an algorithm to efficiently map XML documents into relational schema. The statistics shows that our approach is more efficient than XRel.