Design and Implementation of a Document Database Extension

Integration of text and documents into database management systems has been the subject of much research. However, most of the approaches are limited to data retrieval. Collaborative text editing, i.e. the ability for multiple users to work on a document instance simultaneously, is rarely supported. Also, documents mostly consist of plain text only, and support very limited meta data storage or search. We address the problem by proposing an extended definition of document data type which comprises not only the text itself but also structural information such as layout, template and semantics, as well as document creation meta data. We implemented a new collaborative data type Document which supports document manipulation via a text editing API and extended SQL syntax (TX SQL), as detailed in this work. We report also on the search capabilities of our document management system and present some of the future challenges for collaborative document management.