Using XQuery to Build Updatable XML Views Over Relational Databases

XML has become an important medium for data exchange, and is frequently used as an interface to - i.e. a view of - a relational database. Although much attention has been paid to the problem of querying relational databases through XML views, the problem of updating relational databases through XML views has not been addressed. In this paper we investigate how a subset of XQuery can be used to build updatable XML views, so that an update to the view can be unambiguously translated to a set of updates on the underlying relational database, assuming that certain key and foreign key constraints hold. In particular, we show how views defined in this subset of XQuery can be mapped to a set of relational views, thus transforming the problem of updating relational databases through XML views into a classical problem of updating relational databases through relational views.