The Table and the Tree: On-Line Access to Relational Data Through Virtual XML Documents

For speed and convenience, applications routinely cache XML data locally, and access it through standard parser (SAX) or tree (DOM) interfaces. When the source of this data is a relational database, the consistency and integrity guarantees of the database are sacrificed for speed. We present the ROLEX system (standing for Relational On-Line Exchange with XML) which provides applications "live" virtual XML views of relational data through standard interfaces. This technology, combined with a main-memory database platform, promises to provide data integrity, consistent interoperation with relational applications, and the performance required by busy web or e-commerce applications.