Re: [xml-dev] XQuery & Several records (instead of one xml-field)

[noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com]

Dmitry,

You seem to be interested in some of what's been done to integrate 
relational databases with XML Query.  About a year ago, the IBM Systems 
Journal published an entire issue devoted to XML and IBM's work with it. 
There are several articles talking about how XML is integrated into IBM's 
DB2 Relational Database product.   I'm not sure whether any of them 
directly answer the particular question you've asked, but the entire 
contents of that issue are online at [1].

I note in particular the articles titled:  Integration of SQL and XQuery 
in IBM DB2 [2] and also DB2 goes hybrid: Integrating native XML and XQuery 
with relational data and SQL [3].  I haven't read these since they came 
out a year ago, but you might find them interesting.  The shipping version 
of DB2 has many (perhaps all, I haven't checked lately) of the features 
described in these articles.  Another note on XML support in DB2, 
published while the product was still in beta, is up on DeveloperWorks at 
[4].  In general, you can store combinations of XML and and traditional 
relational data in the same database.  You can use your choice of SQL with 
XML extensions or XML Query to do queries and joins over combinations of 
the XML and the non-XML relational data.   I believe that most of our big 
(and some of our smaller) competitors have databases that are broadly 
similar in that respect, though different in a number of interesting 
details.

Noah

[1] http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj45-2.html
[2] http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/452/ozcan.html
[3] http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/452/beyer.html
[4] 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0602saracco/

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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