XML and Databases

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Lecturer

Prof. Dr. Peter Fischer

Organization

Lecture: Wednesday, 8 - 10, SR 00-010/14, Building 101(Course Catalog Entry)

Exercises: Friday, 13 - 15, SR 00-010/14, Building 101 (Course Catalog Entry)

Exam:

• Thursday, March 8th, 2012, 10am, SR 00-010/14, Building 101 (changed to avoid overlap with other exams).
• An older exam is available for exercise, please ask for the password if you haven't received it yet.
• Duration of the exam: 90 minutes
• Closed book
• Exam is corrected, grades are in the QIS
• Klausureinsicht is postponed to Tuesday, March 20th at 16:00 at Building 051, Room 01-026

Content

XML is becoming increasingly important in the IT industry. It is conceived as the silver bullet for archiving of data, meta-data management, and data integration. The expectations are high; at the same time, XML is also the source for a great deal of confusion. XML is more than just a syntax with angle brackets. There are a number of standards that are based on XML and a growing number of products that support various versions of these standards.

This lecture gives an overview of the most important XML technologies. A strong emphasis is on architecture and optimization techniques that show how XML can be implemented efficiently in database products and applications. The goal of this lecture is to learn about the basics to implement XML technology reliably and efficiently in various different application contexts. Specifically, this lecture will cover the following topics:

1. XML Basics: XML, Namespaces
2. XML Validation: DTD, XML Schema
3. XML Data models (Infoset, PSVI, XDM)
4. XML Processing and the W3C XQuery family:

   • XPath

   • XQuery

   • XQuery Update Facility

   • XQuery Full-Text Extension

   • XQuery Scripting Extension

   • XSLT

5. Implementation Techniques: Compiler Support, Storage, Indexing, Optimization

6. XML and Web Technologies

Literature

The following books should be helpful:

• "XML Schema" (Eric van der Vlist, O'Reilly 2002/2003).
• "XQuery" (Priscilla Walmsley, O'Reilly, 2007).
• "XQuery from the experts" (Katz, Addison-Wesley, 2004)

All of them are available at the library.

There is no single book/paper for the implementation part. I will try to provide references to the relevant scientific papers.