Constraint preserving transformation from relational schema to XML schema

XML has become the standard for publishing and exchanging data on the Web. However, most business data is managed and will remain to be managed by relational database management systems. As such, there is an increasing need to efficiently and accurately publish relational data as XML documents for Internet-based applications. One way to publish relational data is to provide virtual XML documents for relational data via an XML schema which is transformed from the underlying relational database schema such that users can access the relational database through the XML schema. In this paper, we discuss issues in transforming a relational database schema into the corresponding XML schema. We aim to preserve all integrity constraints defined in a relational database schema, to achieve high level of nesting and to avoid introducing data redundancy in the transformed XML schema. In the paper, we first propose a basic transformation algorithm which introduces no data redundancy, then we improve the algorithm by exploring further nesting of the transformed XML schema.