An Interpreter Approach for Exporting Relational Data into XML Documents with Structured Export Markup Language

Abstract

Almost all enterprises use relational databases to handle real time business operations and most need to generate various XML documents for data exchanges internally among various departments and externally with business partners. Exporting data in a relational database to an XML document can be considered a data conversion process. Based on the four approaches for data conversion: Customized program, Interpretive transformer, Translator generator, and Logical level translation, this paper proposes a new interpretive approach using Structured Export Markup Language (SEML) interpreter for converting relational data into XML documents. The frameworks and languages proposed by other researchers are neither generic nor able to generate arbitrary XML documents. Therefore, SEML interpreter is a simple, user friendly, and complete solution with a new mark-up language ? SEML ? for data conversion. The solution can be used as a generic tool for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) purposes. In other words, the SEML interpreter is a solution for relational databases similar to what X-Query is for XML databases.