Translating XML Update Language into SQL

Abstract

Several techniques for translating XML query languages into SQL have been proposed but no work to date translates XML update languages into SQL since XQuery has not provided any update statements. However there is a suggestion from W3C indicating that an update version of XQuery will be proposed in the near future. Furthermore one major advantage of updating XML documents via a relational database is that the preservation of constraints can be transferred to the database engine; thus our main contributions are translating the XML update language, extending XQuery into SQL and translating recursive updates into PL/SQL. XQuery is a functional language whereas SQL is a declarative language; therefore translation cannot be performed directly so several techniques such as rewriting rules and graph mapping are used in our work.