Integrating Relational Databases and XML Technology: the ERX Tool

This paper reports about our experience in developing the ERX Data Management System, a system devised to collect data coming from different XML data sources, and store them into a database in a way independent of the source format; its query language, named ERX-QL, is able to query the database and generate new XML documents. We developed the ERX Data Management System to explore the possibility of integrating three different basic technologies, Relational DBMS, Java and XSLT, under a unifying framework which makes the system interoperable w.r.t. the particular adopted technology (for example Relational vs Object-Oriented database technology); hence, this framework is based on an Entity-Relationship-like Data Model (ERX), which is not tied to any specific technical and/or commercial solution