Processing XML view queries including user-defined foreign functions on relational databases

With the increased popularity of XML, XML publishing of RDBs has been attracting a lot of research interest. One of the typical approaches is to use a middleware system to render XML views over RDBs and to allow users to access data with XML query languages such as XQuery. The query processing is done efficiently by making the best of the querying power of RDBMSs. Namely, XML queries are translated into SQL queries and tagging operations, which are processed by the RDBMSs and middleware, respectively. In some XML query languages including XQuery, use of user-defined foreign functions is enabled or planned as an extension feature to cope with domain dependent semantics. Foreign functions are defined for XML fragments, and their implementations are often given by codes in a general programming language. The existing query processing schemes on XML views do not consider cases where foreign functions are included in XML queries. We propose extended schemes to process XML queries in such cases. In the proposed schemes, the middleware takes care of processing foreign functions as well as tagging operations. Therefore, the proposed schemes are applicable to XML views on commonly available RDBMSs. Three types of query processing schemes are proposed, and their performance is studied with experiments.