A Comparative Study Between Two Types of Database Management Systems: XML-Enabled Relational and Native XML

As there is an increase use of XML documents to store and exchange data over the web, there is a great need for a database management system able to store, retrieve and manipulate XML data with an efficient manner, here the XML database (XML DB) can cope this request. Most XML DB which is often called XML-enabled databases is a legacy database systems (mostly relational) extended to store, retrieve and manipulate XML data; few of them are native XML databases that directly and naturally support XML data by capturing all the characteristics of XML data representation. The two XML DB types have different characteristics and performance which make it difficult to choose the best XML DB to suit XML data. Thus, the major objective of this paper is to explore and compare between the performances of both: XML-enabled database and native XML database. Regarding this matter, our paper search for deciding whether an XMLenabled relational database, as a relatively mature technology, or native XML database is suitable for storing XML data in a way that allow an efficient query performance. Our runing experimental proved that the native XML database is performing better than XML-enabled relational database for XMark benchmark queries.