Relational Storage of XML: The XML Type

XQuery processing on XML stored in the database as an LOB depends heavily on the actual physical storage mechanism chosen to store the XML. All LOB-based storage mechanisms have in common that they basically provide a built-in XML datatype. In the following, we use the relational type named XML to designate a new SQL built-in datatype that provides the logical abstraction for XML data stored in a relational database.

Listing 7.2 gives an example of a relational table where one column is of type XML. While the example uses an XML document representing structured data that could also be mapped into relational tables, the discussion of the XML datatype below applies equally to any form of XML data (semi-structured ...

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