XPERANTO: Publishing Object-Relational Data as XML.
Michael J. Carey, Daniela Florescu, Zachary G. Ives, Ying Lü, Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, Eugene J. Shekita, Subbu N. Subramanian · 2000
Since its introduction, XML, the eXtended Markup Language, has quickly emerged as the universal format for publishing and exchanging data in the World Wide Web. As a result, data sources, including object-relational databases, are now faced with a new class of users: clients and customers who would like to deal directly with XML data rather than being forced to deal with the data source’s particular (e.g., object-relational) schema and query language. The goal of the XPERANTO project at the IBM Almaden Research Center is to serve as a middleware layer that supports the publishing of XML data to this class of users. XPERANTO provides a uniform, XML-based query interface over an object-relational database that allows users to query and (re)structure the contents of the database as XML data, ignoring the underlying SQL tables and query language. In this paper, we give an overview of the XPERANTO system prototype, explaining how it translates XML-based queries into SQL requests, receives and then structures the tabular query results, and finally returns XML documents to the system’s users and applications.