Towards Full Integration Of XML And Advanced Database Concepts

Most advanced database systems courses focus on core aspects of relational design, data modeling, transaction processing, and distributed database issues. Given the ever increasing importance of web enabled databases generally but particularly the influence of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), an alternative approach would be to teach the traditional core principles while integrating an XML module into the course.  The focus of this paper is to elaborate on how such an integration would be accomplished in an advanced database course

X-Databases - The Integration of XML into Enterprise Database Management Systems

An examination of how the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and database management systems (DBMS) fit together, and current approaches to providing database technologies that support XML. Analysis of how XML is being deployed in four classes of XML Database (X-Database) applications provides a basis for understanding the direction of X-Database technology and associated standards. In a simple implementation, an XML Document Type Definition (DTD) is mapped to relational structures, and XML data are stored in a DBMS (Oracle8i). Sample queries are presented to retrieve XML from the database. A middleware tool (XSQL Java Servlet) is used to transform query results into records on a Web page. The results demonstrate that relational databases require data to be rigidly mapped to relational structures. The paper concludes by exploring future challenges to integrating XML and DTDs with X-Databases, which establishes the need for a more "native" integration approach

A Framework for XML-based Integration of Data, Visualization and Analysis in a Biomedical Domain

Biomedical data are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous in nature. The data are stored in distributed information systems, using a variety of data models, and are processed by increasingly more complex tools that analyze and visualize them. We present in this paper our framework for integrating biomedical research data and tools into a unique Web front end. Our framework is applied to the University of Washington’s Human Brain Project. Specifically, we present solutions to four integration tasks: definition of complex mappings from relational sources to XML, distributed XQuery processing, generation of heterogeneous output formats, and the integration of heterogeneous data visualization and analysis tools

Information Integration - the process of integration, evolution and versioning

At present, many information sources are available wherever you are. Most of the time, the information needed is spread across several of those information sources. Gathering this information is a tedious and time consuming job. Automating this process would assist the user in its task. Integration of the information sources provides a global information source with all information needed present. All of these information sources also change over time. With each change of the information source, the schema of this source can be changed as well. The data contained in the information source, however, cannot be changed every time, due to the huge amount of data that would have to be converted in order to conform to the most recent schema.\ud In this report we describe the current methods to information integration, evolution and versioning. We distinguish between integration of schemas and integration of the actual data. We also show some key issues when integrating XML data sources

Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US