XML DB is a new feature in Oracle 9i Release 2 that seamlessly integrates XML processing with relational technology offering the advantages of indexing, transactional updates, SQL querying, and constraint management in a robust, secure and scalable environment. During this presentation we will describe a system that uses XML DB for storing data in a flexible, multi-dimensional XML model. Using XML DB as the storage repository will allow us to incorporate data from any source and publish it in a variety of output formats such as HTML, graphs, spreadsheets etc after doing some intelligent processing involving comparison, filtration and aggregation.

This session will discuss various alternatives for modeling and storing XML data such as CLOBS/Oracle Text, structured mapping using XMLType and finally a transformation scheme to standard relational tables. Each of these approaches offer different tradeoffs in ease of application development and performance. We will illustrate several such scenarios using quantitative experimental data. The audience will get a close look at crucial XML modeling and querying techniques that can be used to build high performance XML applications using Oracle XML DB.