Recursive XML schemas, recursive XML queries, and relational storage: XML-to-SQL query translation

We consider the problem of translating XML queries into SQL when XML documents have been stored in an RDBMS using a schema-based relational decomposition. Surprisingly, there is no published XML-to-SQL query translation algorithm for this scenario that handles recursive XML schemas. We present a generic algorithm to translate path expression queries into SQL in the presence of recursion in the schema and queries. This algorithm handles a general class of XML-to-relational mappings, which includes all techniques proposed in literature. Some of the salient features of this algorithm are: (i) It translates a path expression query into a single SQL query, irrespective of how complex the XML schema is, (ii) It uses the "with" clause in SQL99 to handle recursive queries even over nonrecursive schemas, (iii) It reconstructs recursive XML subtrees with a single SQL query and (iv) It shows that the support for linear recursion in SQL99 is sufficient for handling path expression queries over arbitrarily complex recursive XML schema.