Storing and Retrieval of Multiversion XML Documents in Relational Databases

In this paper, we propose a method of managing versions of XML documents by using relational databases. Data structures based on relational tables are developed for accommodating versions of XML documents. The structure information, the contents, and changes of the versions are stored in relational tables. Thus, SQL can be exploited in queries such as horizontal queries, vertical queries, and delta queries without parsing the documents. The structure information and contents of all versions are not represented explicitly in the tables, those of certain versions which are called snapshot versions are represented. Other versions are represented indirectly as sequences of operations that are stored in the corresponding tables. The experiment shows the space performance.