Building a Configurable Database Application for Structured Documents

Storing structured documents in object-oriented databases and fragmenting them according to their logical structure gives way to more expressive querying mechanisms, as compared to conventional document-management systems. At a rst stage, however, such an approach does not come out too good with regard to the performance of certain other basic operations. Thus, our database-application framework for document storage has been extended so that document-type-speci c semantics can be re ected with documents' database-internal representation. In this article, the dimensions of con gurability are described. Further, we say how the parameters are speci ed and how the non-trivial problems with regard to the realization have been solved. We discuss which (not-yet-existing) database features might have been advantageous in this context.