Evaluierung alternativer Ansätze zur Integration von XML und Datenbanken

Nowadays, database management systems (DBMS) are playing an important role in the realization of modern information systems for efficient storage, management and retrieval of a large amount of data. At the same time the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is fast emerging as de facto standard for electronic data exchange and is considered as a potential success of HTML for the representation of data on the WWW. To benefit from both technologies, there are already a number of research prototypes available aiming at the integration of XML and DBMS. In addition, more and more commercial DBMS manufactures extend their products with various capabilities for managing XML data. The goal of this thesis is the development of a comprehensive criteria catalogue to enable the evaluation of different approaches for integrating XML and DBMS. For this, not only approaches suggested by various research groups for storing, querying and manipulation XML data within databases are taken into account, but also XML features of commercial DBMS. Integration is considered mainly along three orthogonal dimensions comprising mapping alternatives, representation of mapping knowledge and access alternatives, whereby the focus is on relational and object-relational DBMS. Based on the criteria catalogue and an example out of the area of web-based tourism information systems three commercial DBMS are evaluated in detail.