A Decade of XML Data Management: An Industrial Experience Report from Oracle

XML and its related technologies have now been in use for almost a decade. There has been considerable amount of effort both from research and industry focusing on XML, XQuery/XPath, XSLT and SQL/XML processing in the database. Many research prototypes and industrial products have been built to satisfy the XML use cases. This paper reviews several use cases where XML databases are leveraged to build real-world XML applications. We discuss the lessons learnt in supporting both data-centric and document-centric XMLDB applications within a single database system and the need for the implementation of different XML storage, index and query optimisation techniques for different XML use cases. We show the value of managing XML in databases, the current challenges and improvements that will hopefully promote future research directions. This paper also provides a timely checkpoint of XML data management from industrial perspective with experience of developing and supporting Oracle XML products.