Automatic Generation of SQLX View Definitions from ORA-SS Views

Abstract

Although XML is the dominant standard for publishing and exchanging data for Internet-based business applications, data is typically stored in relational or object-relational databases. Thus, it is necessary to define XML views over these traditional databases. Unfortunately, it is not easy for users to manually write SQLX queries to define the XML views. This paper describes a method to automatically generate SQLX view definitions from object-relational databases. We utilize the semantically rich ORA-SS data model to capture the schematic structure and semantics of the underlying data. Valid ORA-SS views are first designed on the ORA-SS schema, before they are mapped to XML views. The generated view definitions are SQL queries with XML extension (SQLX) that can be directly evaluated on object-relational databases to materialize the views. This approach removes the need to manually write executable view definitions for the XML views, and provides a user-friendly interface to retrieve XML data via views.