Efficient Storage of XML Data

NATIX is an efficient, native repository for storing, retrieving and managing XML documents. Other systems map XML data into structures maintainable by traditional DBMS. This introduces additional layers between the logical data and its physical storage, slowing down both updates and query processing. NATIX is native in the sense that it supports tree-structured objects like XML documents at low architecture levels. One example for this low-level support of tree-structured large objects is our parameterizable split algorithm. It dynamically maintains physical records of size smaller than a page which contain sets of connected tree nodes. This not only improves efficiency by clustering subtrees but also facilitates their compact representation. 1. Motivation XML (eXtensible Markup Language) was originally designed to be an exchange format for documents and data over the Internet. With the advent of query/stylesheet languages, XML is increasingly used not only during transfer, but also as storage format for processing and querying the data. Hence, efficient repositories for XML are needed.