Advanced Data Management

5.4 Native XML Storage

Storing XML documents in a format that makes processing it (querying and updating it) effcient is often called native XML storage; database systems that use such an efficient storage format (instead of relational tables) are called native XML databases. Such native XML databases should provide all the features of a general DBMS (see Section 1.1). An additional requirement for native XML storage is round-tripping: when an XML document is stored and later on retrieved, its original structure must be preserved including the document order of all its elements and attributes. Moreover, regarding database access from external programs, some standards have been defined to facilitate access and interoperation with native XML databases: ...