CS 561   Spring 2007.

CS561 "HOMEWORK" #4

Assigned: Thursday, Feb 15, 2007
Due: Thursday, Feb 22, 2007

To do:

• Read the assigned "XML/XQUERY/XML-DB" book chapter to gain an understanding of the basics by next week.

• Prepare one written report on the topic of "XML + DB" to be turned in in the next class meeting. To be reasonably deep, this report will likely be longer this time than 1 page. The goal is to tease out the main points from the reading, and ideally to attempt to go beyond that particular readings.
• Possible topics you could consider in your critique include:
  • Identify the similarities and more importantly the differences between an XML data model versus the relational data model.
  • Characterize the main query features that XQUERY provides in comparison to SQL; do not focus on the syntax per se but rather on the underlying query semantics/capabiities.
  • Think through what are the challenges one would have to solve and techniques you one would have to design to develop a native XML query engine. Or, put differently, what could possibly be borrowed from a traditional relational engine in terms of ideas or techniques to build such a native XML engine?.

  Note: If you would like, you could also think about and write about alternative designs for integrating XML with a traditional relational database. But we will begin to study this more closely the week after only; when each of the CS561 teams presents the solutions taken by the different RDB vendors. So it would make sense to leave this topic for a later week.