A Structured Text ADT for Object-Relational Databases

There is a growing need, both for use within corporate intranets and within the rapidly evolving World Wide Web, to develop tools that are able to retrieve relevant textual information rapidly, to present textual information in a meaningful way, and to integrate textual information with related data retrieved from other sources. This paper introduces a model for structured text and presents a small set of operations that may be applied against this model. Using these operations structured text may be selected, marked, fragmented, and transformed into relations for use in relational and object oriented database systems. The extended functionality has been accepted for inclusion within the SQL/MM standard, and a prototype database engine that supports SQL with extensions to incorporate the proposed text operations has been implemented. This prototype serves as a proof of concept intended to address industrial concerns, and it demonstrates the power of the proposed abstract data type for structured text.