Schema Advisor for Hybrid RelationalXML DBMS

摘要

In response to the widespread use of the XML format for document representation and message exchange, ma- jor database vendors support XML in terms of persistence, querying and indexing. Specifically, the recently released IBM DB2 9 (for Linux, Unix and Windows) is a hybrid data server with optimized management of both XML and relational data. With the new option of storing and query- ing XML in a relational DBMS, data architects face the the decision of what portion of their data to persist as XML and what portion as relational data. This problem has not been addressed yet and represents a serious need in the industry. Hence, this paper describes ReXSA, a schema advisor tool that is being prototyped for IBM DB2 9. ReXSA proposes candidate database schemas given an information model of the enterprise data. It has the advantage of considering qual- itative properties of the information model such as reuse, evolution and performance profiles for deciding how to per- sist the data. Finally, we show the viability and practicality of ReXSA by applying it to custom and real usecases.