XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems

8.9. Conclusion

We have investigated the practical implementation of a database model that can represent DOM node trees, and hence is able to store the content of any well-formed XML document. Since we are working at a higher level of abstraction than a schema-specific model, query building can prove more complex, but it does have the advantage of genericity. The merging of DOM with the Nested Sets Model allows us to navigate the document without recourse to walking the entire node tree. This feature allows for fast serialization and querying, but at the expense of slower updates (since insertions and deletions may require updates to the (x, y) coordinates of many nodes).

The major benefit of this exercise is that it provides the relational database ...