An SQL Function for the Construction of Recursively Structured XML values from the Relational Data
Sung‐Chul Park, Young-Chul Park · 2009
SQL:2003 standard provides SQL/XML publishing functions to publish the result of an SQL query as XML values but it does not provide any SQL/XML publishing function that can publish the result of a recursive query as recursively structured XML values. Therefore, for the relational tuples which are connected directly or indirectly according to given conditions, to publish both the contents of them and the relationship among them as XML values with the use of appropriate SQL/XML publishing functions, we have to write a nested SQL query. Writing that query, however, is not easy provided that the depth of the connections is deep even if we know the depth of them and is not possible once the depth of the connections is not known in advance. In order to resolve that problem, we propose a new SQL function XMLNEST that can publish the result of a recursive query as recursively structured XML values.