Representing and Querying the Evolution of Databases and their Schemas in XML.
Fusheng Wang, Carlo Zaniolo · 2003
We show that XML views combined with XML query languages can provide surprisingly effective solutions to the problem of representing and querying the evolution of databases---both the evolution of their contents and the evolution of their schemas. Indeed, using XML, the histories of database relations can be represented naturally by means of temporally grouped data models. We show that schema changes and table histories that would be very difficult to represent in relational databases can be easily represented using XML, and also queried using XQuery.