XAPP: An Implementation of SAX-Based Method for Mapping XML Document to and from a Relational Database

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the standard medium for data exchange among businesses over the Internet, hence the need for effective management. However, since XML was not designed for storage and retrieval, its management has become an open research area in the database community. Existing mapping techniques for XML-to-relational database adopt either the structural mapping or the model mapping. Though numerous mapping approaches have been developed, mapping and reconstruction time had been problematic, especially when the document size is large and can hardly fit into main memory. In this research, an application codenamed XAPP, a new lightweight application that adopts a novel model mapping approach was developed using Simple API for XML (SAX) parser. XAPP accepts a document with or without Document Type Definition (DTD). It implements two algorithms: one maps XML data to a relational database and improves mapping time, and the other reconstructs an XML document from a relational database to improve reconstruction time and minimise memory usage. The performance of XAPP was analysed and compared with the Document Object Model (DOM) algorithm. XAPP proves to perform significantly better than the DOM-based algorithm in terms of mapping and reconstruction time, and memory efficiency. The correctness of XAPP was also verified.