Introduction
XML has become ubiquitous, and XML data has to be managed in databases. The current industry standard is to map XML data into relational tables and store this information in a relational database. Such mappings create both expressive power problems (such as requiring transitive closure computations to compute ancestor-descendant relationships) and performance problems (for instance to reconstruct XML for output).
In the TIMBER project we are exploring the issues involved in storing XML in native format. We recognize XML documents to be trees, and build a system to manipulate collections of trees. In doing so, we attempt to avoid the pitfall of "instance-at-a-time" navigational access. Rather, we attempt to bring to bear the core ideas of database technology, such as declarative querying, a bulk algebra, and cost-based query optimization.
The name TIMBER is actually an acronym for: Tree-structured native XML database Implemented at the University of Michigan by Bright :-) Energetic Researchers
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Page last modified on 09/May/06