XML Database - NXD, XAPI, Apache Xindice, Ozone DB, Sedna

XML Database - NXD, XAPI, Apache Xindice, Ozone DB, Sedna

XML Database - what's it?

XML Databse is just like any other database system with the only difference being the data is stored in XML format in this case. We have two major categories of XML Databases:-

• XML-enabled DB: Here the underlying database is one of the traditional databases only, but the database gets equipped with the ability of mapping the XML input into the format which the underlying DB can understand and it also takes care of mapping the returned output of the underlying DB into the corresponding XML output for the user. Evidently such an XML DB is different from any other traditional DB in only one sense - it handles the mappings automatically and the user of not bothered to do that in the middleware.
• Native XML DB (NXD): This category is also known as NXD. Databases belonging to this category has XML document as the fundamental unit of storage (the way we have row of a table as the fundamental unit of storage in a traditional relational DB). How the data is actually stored in the DB is of little concern (if at all) to the user and it's an implementation dependent stuff and it may not be in form of text files.

Why do we use XML Databases?

Very simple to answer this question... right? XML has become a norm for data transportation these days so you may have a requirement of directly dealing with XML Input and similarly you may need to return an XML Output. In such cases (which are increasingly getting more and more popular) XML DB can be of great help which avoids you to pay much attention to how the mappings actually take place.

XAPI - XML:DB API

Similar to JDBC ad ODBC in case of relational databases, we have XAPI for XML Databases which provide an implementation-independent access to the XML database.

Examples of XML Databases

• Apache Xindice - it is pronounced as (zeen-dee-chay). It's an example of a Native XML DB. It's basically a continuation of the project named 'dbXML Core' which was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in Dec, 2001. As already specified why NXDs are used, if you deal with XML Input and XML output then Apache Xindice is something you may find quite interesting. Needless to mention, like other Apache projects this is also Open Source and Free. Apache Xindice V1.1 released on May 09, 2007. Apache Xindice supports XAPI for Java Development and XML-RPC API for other languages. More details can be found here.
• Ozone Database - it's an Open Source, Java-based, Object-Oriented Native XML DBMS which is completely implemented in Java and hence it supports an application program to run directly in a transactional database environment. Ozone DB has a DOM Implementation (compliant to W3C) supporting the XML data storage and retrieval and you can use almost every XML tool to access the data. It also supports Apache Xerces-J and xalan-J. One important point to note here is that Ozone DB doesn't depend on any back-end DB or mapping technology as it contains its own clustered storage and cache system to store and manage persistent Java objects. More details can be found here.
• Sedna DB - it's another Native XML DB implemented in C/C++ which supports a wide range of XML applications including Content Management, Event-based SOA, etc. It's a full-fledged DBMS and it supports W3C compliant XQuery language for querying. This is also an Open Source DB and can be obtained for free under Apache Licence 2.0. It's now available for all popular platforms - Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS. More details can be found here.
• myXMLDB - another Open Source Native XML Db which has been implemented on top of MySQL and which uses BLOBs to store the XML documents with a maximum size of 256MB each. It has a GUI interafce and it has a Java implementation of XAPI. This XML DB is known for supporting huge XML documents. Since most of other well-known XML databases use DOM for storing an XML doc hence they can't support really huge XML docs. DOM is inherently very memory consuming and this is where myXMLDB takes the lead over the others. If your project requires some really huge XML Docs to be stored and accessed then you would probably be left with this option only. More details can be found here.

Apart from these Native XML databases, we have several XML-enabled Databases as well. Soem of them being MS Access 2002, IBM DB2, MS FoxPro, IBM Informix, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase ASE 12.5, PostgreSQL, etc. A comprehensive list and details of all these XML Databases can be found here.

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