Incremental Validation of String-Based XML Data in Databases, File Systems, and Streams

Although the native (tree-like) storage of XML data becomes more and more important there will be an enduring demand to manage XML data in its textual representation, for instance in relational structures or file systems. XML data has to be wellformed by definition and additionally, in many cases, it has to be valid according to a given XML schema. Because the XML column types are often derived from text types (e.g. CLOBs) guaranteeing well-formedness as well as validity is not trivial. And even worse, for frequently modified data it is usually too expensive to re-validate the whole XML data after each update – but waiving re-validation may lead to inconsistencies and malfunctions of applications. In this paper we present a schema-aware pushdown automaton (i.e. a stack machine) that validates an XML string/stream. Using an element/state-index, the pushdown automaton is able to re-validate local modifications of the data while guaranteeing overall validity. Update operations (e.g. SQLXML, XQuery updates) are validated before executing them.