Abstract. In the UIMA text annotation framework the most common way to store annotated documents (CAS) is by serializing the document to XML and storing this XML in a file in the file system. We present a framework to store CASes as well as their type systems in a relational database. This does not only provide a way to improve document management but also the possibility to access and manipulate selective parts of the annotated documents using the database’s index structures. The approach has been implemented for MSSQL and MySQL databases