OLAP Query Processing for XML Data in RDBMS

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become an important format for data exchange and representation on the Web. In addition to conventional query processing, more complex analysis on XML data is considered to become important in order to discover valuable information. In this research, we attempt to investigate an XML-OLAP, by which we can perform multidimensional analysis on XML data taking XML's features into account. Users are allowed to specify XML data-cube by XPath, and perform analytical processing by XQuery with OLAP extension. The system is implemented on top of relational databases, and the given requests for data-cube specification and analysis are translated into SQL so that they can be processed using the underlying system. We show the feasibility of the proposed scheme by experimental evaluations.