Triggers over XML views of relational data

Abstract

XML has emerged as a dominant standard for information exchange on the Internet. However, a large fraction of data continues to be stored in relational databases. At a high level, there are two approaches to supporting triggers over XML views. The first is to materialize the entire view and store it in an XML database with support for XML triggers. However, this approach suffers from the overhead of replicating and incrementally maintaining the materialized XML on every relational update affecting the view, even though users may only be interested in relatively rare events. In this paper, we propose the alternative approach of translating XML triggers into SQL triggers. There are some challenges involved in this approach, however, because triggers can be specified over complex XML views with nested predicates, while SQL triggers can only be specified over flat tables. Consequently, even identifying the parts of an XML view that could have changed due to a (possibly deeply nested) SQL update is a non-trivial task, as is the problem of computing the old and new values of an updated fragment of the view. We address the above challenges and propose a system architecture and an algorithm for supporting triggers over XML views of relational data. We implement and evaluate our system; the performance results indicate our techniques are a feasible approach to supporting triggers over XML views of relational data.