Authors = Vanessa Braganholo, Susan Davidson and Carlos Heuser.
Title = On the updatability of XML views over relational databases
Published at = WebDB 2003, San Diego, California, 2003
 
Abstract: 
 
XML has become an important medium for data exchange, and is also used
as an interface to -- i.e. a view of -- a relational database.  While
previous work has considered XML views for the purpose of querying
relational databases (e.g. Silkroute), in this paper we consider the
problem of updating a relational database through an XML view.  Using
the nested relational algebra as the formalism for an XML view of a 
relational database, we
study the problem of when such views are updatable.  Our results rely
on the observation that in many XML views of relational databases, the
nest operator occurs last and the unnest operator does not occur at
all.  Since in this case the nest operator is invertible, we can
consider this important class of XML views as if they were flat
relational views.