XML, XPath, and XQuery

Zachary G. IvesUniversity of Pennsylvania

CIS 550 – Database & Information Systems

October 18, 2005

Some slide content courtesy of Susan Davidson & Raghu Ramakrishnan

2

Administrivia

Upcoming: recitation section on the RSS feeder

Project plans due 11/1 For projects other than RSS feeder:

description of project goals In all cases: Describe how you will be dividing

up the work List of project milestones (remember to leave

time for integration!)

Homework 4 (XML) will be due 11/3

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Why XML?

XML is the confluence of several factors: The Web needed a more declarative format for data Documents needed a mechanism for extended tags Database people needed a more flexible interchange

format “Lingua franca” of data It’s parsable even if we don’t know what it means!

Original expectation: The whole web would go to XML instead of HTML

Today’s reality: Not so… But XML is used all over “under the covers”

4

Why DB People Like XML

Can get data from all sorts of sources Allows us to touch data we don’t own! This was actually a huge change in the DB community

Interesting relationships with DB techniques Useful to do relational-style operations Leverages ideas from object-oriented, semistructured

data

Blends schema and data into one format Unlike relational model, where we need schema first … But too little schema can be a drawback, too!

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XML Anatomy<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <dblp> <mastersthesis mdate="2002-01-03" key="ms/Brown92">  <author>Kurt P. Brown</author>   <title>PRPL: A Database Workload Specification Language</title>   <year>1992</year>   <school>Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison</school>   </mastersthesis> <article mdate="2002-01-03" key="tr/dec/SRC1997-018">  <editor>Paul R. McJones</editor>   <title>The 1995 SQL Reunion</title>   <journal>Digital System Research Center Report</journal>   <volume>SRC1997-018</volume>   <year>1997</year>   <ee>db/labs/dec/SRC1997-018.html</ee>   <ee>http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/</ee>   </article>

Processing Instr.

Element

Attribute

Close-tag

Open-tag

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Well-Formed XML

A legal XML document – fully parsable by an XML parser All open-tags have matching close-tags (unlike

so many HTML documents!), or a special:<tag/> shortcut for empty tags (equivalent to

<tag></tag>

Attributes (which are unordered, in contrast to elements) only appear once in an element

There’s a single root element XML is case-sensitive

7

XML as a Data Model

XML “information set” includes 7 types of nodes: Document (root) Element Attribute Processing instruction Text (content) Namespace Comment

XML data model includes this, plus typing info, plus order info and a few other things

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XML Data Model Visualized(and simplified!)

Root

?xml dblp

mastersthesis article

mdate key

author title year school editor title yearjournal volume eeee

mdatekey

2002…

ms/Brown92

Kurt P….

PRPL…

1992

Univ….

2002…

tr/dec/…

Paul R.

The…

Digital…

SRC…

1997

db/labs/dec

http://www.

attributeroot

p-i element

text

9

What Does XML Do?

Serves as a document format (super-HTML) Allows custom tags (e.g., used by MS Word,

openoffice) Supplement it with stylesheets (XSL) to define

formatting

Data exchange format (must agree on terminology)

Marshalling and unmarshalling data in SOAP and Web Services

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XML as a Super-HTML(MS Word)

<h1 class="Section1"><a name="_top“ />CIS 550: Database and Information Systems</h1><h2 class="Section1">Fall 2004</h2><p class="MsoNormal">

<place>311 Towne</place>, Tuesday/Thursday<time Hour="13" Minute="30">1:30PM –

3:00PM</time></p>

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XML Easily Encodes Relations

sid

serno

exp-grade

1 570103

B

23 550103

A<student-course-grade><tuple><sid>1</sid><serno>570103</serno><exp-grade>B</exp-grade></tuple><tuple><sid>23</sid><serno>550103</serno><exp-grade>A</exp-grade></tuple>

</student-course-grade>

Student-course-grade

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But XML is More Flexible…“Non-First-Normal-Form” (NF2)

<parents> <parent name=“Jean” >

<son>John</son><daughter>Joan</daughter><daughter>Jill</daughter>

</parent> <parent name=“Feng”>

<daughter>Felicity</daughter> </parent>… Coincides with “semi-structured data”,

invented by DB people at Penn and Stanford

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Integrating XML: What If We Have Multiple Sources with the Same Tags?

Namespaces allow us to specify a context for different tags

Two parts: Binding of namespace to URI Qualified names

<root xmlns=“http://www.first.com/aspace” xmlns:otherns=“…”>

<tag xmlns:myns=“http://www.fictitious.com/mypath”><thistag>is in the default namespace (aspace)</thistag><myns:thistag>is in myns</myns:thistag><otherns:thistag>is a different tag in otherns</otherns:thistag>

</tag></root>

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XML Isn’t Enough on Its Own

It’s too unconstrained for many cases! How will we know when we’re getting garbage? How will we query? How will we understand what we got?

We also need:Some idea of the structure

Our focus next

Presentation, in some cases – XSL(T) We’ll talk about this soon

Some way of interpreting the tags…? We’ll talk about this later in the semester

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Structural Constraints:Document Type Definitions (DTDs)

The DTD is an EBNF grammar defining XML structure XML document specifies an associated DTD, plus

the root element DTD specifies children of the root (and so on)

DTD defines special significance for attributes: IDs – special attributes that are analogous to keys

for elements IDREFs – references to IDs IDREFS – a nasty hack that represents a list of

IDREFs

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An Example DTD

Example DTD:<!ELEMENT dblp((mastersthesis | article)*)><!ELEMENT mastersthesis(author,title,year,school,committeemember*)><!ATTLIST mastersthesis(mdate CDATA #REQUIRED

key ID #REQUIREDadvisor CDATA #IMPLIED>

<!ELEMENT author(#PCDATA)>

…Example use of DTD in XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <!DOCTYPE dblp SYSTEM “my.dtd"> <dblp>…

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Representing Graphs and Links in XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <!DOCTYPE graph SYSTEM “special.dtd"> <graph>

<author id=“author1”><name>John Smith</name>

</author><article>

<author ref=“author1” /> <title>Paper1</title></article><article>

<author ref=“author1” /> <title>Paper2</title></article>

…

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Graph Data ModelRoot

!DOCTYPE

graph

authorarticle

nametitle

refref

John Smith

author1author1

Paper2

?xml

article

id

author1

author authortitle

Paper1

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Graph Data ModelRoot

!DOCTYPE

graph

authorarticle

nametitle

refref

John Smith

Paper2

?xml

article

id

author1

author authortitle

Paper1

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DTDs Aren’t Expressive Enough

DTDs capture grammatical structure, but have some drawbacks: Not themselves in XML – inconvenient to build

tools for them Don’t capture database datatypes’ domains IDs aren’t a good implementation of keys

Why not?

No way of defining OO-like inheritance

21

XML Schema

Aims to address the shortcomings of DTDs XML syntax Can define keys using XPaths Type subclassing that’s more complex than in

a programming language Programming languages don’t consider order of

member variables! Subclassing “by extension” and “by restriction”

… And, of course, domains and built-in datatypes

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Basics of XML Schema

Need to use the XML Schema namespace (generally named xsd)

simpleTypes are a way of restricting domains on scalars Can define a simpleType based on integer, with values within

a particular range

complexTypes are a way of defining element/attribute structures Basically equivalent to !ELEMENT, but more powerful Specify sequence, choice between child elements Specify minOccurs and maxOccurs (default 1)

Must associate an element/attribute with a simpleType, or an element with a complexType

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Simple Schema Example

<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xsd:element name=“mastersthesis" type=“ThesisType"/> <xsd:complexType name=“ThesisType">

<xsd:attribute name=“mdate" type="xsd:date"/><xsd:attribute name=“key" type="xsd:string"/><xsd:attribute name=“advisor" type="xsd:string"/><xsd:sequence>

<xsd:element name=“author" type=“xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name=“title" type=“xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name=“year" type=“xsd:integer"/> <xsd:element name=“school" type=“xsd:string”/> <xsd:element name=“committeemember"

type=“CommitteeType” minOccurs=“0"/> </xsd:sequence>

</xsd:complexType> </xsd:schema>

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Designing an XML Schema/DTD

Not as formalized as relational data design We can still use ER diagrams to break into entity,

relationship sets ER diagrams have extensions for “aggregation” – treating

smaller diagrams as entities – and for composite attributes Note that often we already have our data in relations and

need to design the XML schema to export them!

Generally orient the XML tree around the “central” objects

Big decision: element vs. attribute Element if it has its own properties, or if you *might* have

more than one of them Attribute if it is a single property – or perhaps not!

25

Recap: XML as a Data Model

XML is a non-first-normal-form (NF2) representation Can represent documents, data Standard data exchange format Several competing schema formats – esp.,

DTD and XML Schema – provide typing information

26

Querying XML

How do you query a directed graph? a tree?

The standard approach used by many XML, semistructured-data, and object query languages: Define some sort of a template describing

traversals from the root of the directed graph In XML, the basis of this template is called an

XPath

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XPaths

In its simplest form, an XPath is like a path in a file system:/mypath/subpath/*/morepath

The XPath returns a node set representing the XML nodes (and their subtrees) at the end of the path

XPaths can have node tests at the end, returning only particular node types, e.g., text(), processing-instruction(), comment(), element(), attribute()

XPath is fundamentally an ordered language: it can query in order-aware fashion, and it returns nodes in order

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Sample XML<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <dblp> <mastersthesis mdate="2002-01-03" key="ms/Brown92">  <author>Kurt P. Brown</author>   <title>PRPL: A Database Workload Specification Language</title>   <year>1992</year>   <school>Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison</school>   </mastersthesis> <article mdate="2002-01-03" key="tr/dec/SRC1997-018">  <editor>Paul R. McJones</editor>   <title>The 1995 SQL Reunion</title>   <journal>Digital System Research Center Report</journal>   <volume>SRC1997-018</volume>   <year>1997</year>   <ee>db/labs/dec/SRC1997-018.html</ee>   <ee>http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/</ee>   </article>

29

XML Data Model VisualizedRoot

?xml dblp

mastersthesis article

mdate key

author title year school editor title yearjournal volume eeee

mdatekey

2002…

ms/Brown92

Kurt P….

PRPL…

1992

Univ….

2002…

tr/dec/…

Paul R.

The…

Digital…

SRC…

1997

db/labs/dec

http://www.

attributeroot

p-i element

text

30

Some Example XPath Queries

/dblp/mastersthesis/title /dblp/*/editor //title //title/text()

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Context Nodes and Relative Paths

XPath has a notion of a context node: it’s analogous to a current directory “.” represents this context node “..” represents the parent node We can express relative paths:

subpath/sub-subpath/../.. gets us back to the context node

By default, the document root is the context node

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Predicates – Selection Operations

A predicate allows us to filter the node set based on selection-like conditions over sub-XPaths:

/dblp/article[title = “Paper1”]

which is equivalent to:

/dblp/article[./title/text() = “Paper1”]

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Axes: More Complex Traversals

Thus far, we’ve seen XPath expressions that go down the tree (and up one step) But we might want to go up, left, right, etc. These are expressed with so-called axes:

self::path-step child::path-step parent::path-step descendant::path-step ancestor::path-step descendant-or-self::path-step ancestor-or-self::path-

step preceding-sibling::path-step following-sibling::path-step preceding::path-step following::path-step

The previous XPaths we saw were in “abbreviated form”

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Querying Order

We saw in the previous slide that we could query for preceding or following siblings or nodes

We can also query a node for its position according to some index: fn::first() , fn::last() return index of 0th & last

element matching the last step: fn::position() gives the relative count of the

current node

child::article[fn::position() = fn::last()]

35

Users of XPath

XML Schema uses simple XPaths in defining keys and uniqueness constraints

XQuery XSLT XLink and XPointer, hyperlinks for XML

36

XQuery

A strongly-typed, Turing-complete XML manipulation language Attempts to do static typechecking against XML Schema Based on an object model derived from Schema

Unlike SQL, fully compositional, highly orthogonal: Inputs & outputs collections (sequences or bags) of XML

nodes Anywhere a particular type of object may be used, may use

the results of a query of the same type Designed mostly by DB and functional language people

Attempts to satisfy the needs of data management and document management The database-style core is mostly complete (even has

support for NULLs in XML!!) The document keyword querying features are still in the

works – shows in the order-preserving default model

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XQuery’s Basic Form

Has an analogous form to SQL’s SELECT..FROM..WHERE..GROUP BY..ORDER BY

The model: bind nodes (or node sets) to variables; operate over each legal combination of bindings; produce a set of nodes

“FLWOR” statement:for {iterators that bind variables}let {collections}where {conditions}order by {order-conditions} (the handout uses old

“SORTBY”)return {output constructor}

38

“Iterations” in XQuery

A series of (possibly nested) FOR statements assigning the results of XPaths to variables

for $root in document(“http://my.org/my.xml”)for $sub in $root/rootElement,

$sub2 in $sub/subElement, …

Something like a template that pattern-matches, produces a “binding tuple”

For each of these, we evaluate the WHERE and possibly output the RETURN template

document() or doc() function specifies an input file as a URI Old version was “document”; now “doc” but it depends on

your XQuery implementation

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Two XQuery Examples

<root-tag> {for $p in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/proceedings, $yr in $p/yrwhere $yr = “1999”return <proc> {$p} </proc>

} </root-tag>

for $i in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/inproceedings[author/text() = “John Smith”]

return <smith-paper><title>{ $i/title/text() }</title><key>{ $i/@key }</key>{ $i/crossref }

</smith-paper>

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Nesting in XQuery

Nesting XML trees is perhaps the most common operationIn XQuery, it’s easy – put a subquery in the return clause where

you want things to repeat!

for $u in document(“dblp.xml”)/universitieswhere $u/country = “USA”return <ms-theses-99>

{ $u/title } { for $mt in $u/../mastersthesis where $mt/year/text() = “1999” and

____________ return $mt/title }

</ms-theses-99>

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Collections & Aggregation in XQuery

In XQuery, many operations return collections XPaths, sub-XQueries, functions over these, … The let clause assigns the results to a variable

Aggregation simply applies a function over a collection, where the function returns a value (very elegant!)

let $allpapers := document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/articlereturn <article-authors>

<count> { fn:count(fn:distinct-values($allpapers/authors)) } </count>

{ for $paper in doc(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/articlelet $pauth := $paper/authorreturn <paper> {$paper/title}

<count> { fn:count($pauth) } </count> </paper>

} </article-authors>

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Collections, Ctd.

Unlike in SQL, we can compose aggregations and create new collections from old:

<result> {let $avgItemsSold := fn:avg(

for $order in document(“my.xml”)/orders/orderlet $totalSold = fn:sum($order/item/quantity)return $totalSold)return $avgItemsSold

} </result>

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Sorting in XQuery

SQL actually allows you to sort its output, with a special ORDER BY clause (which we haven’t discussed, but which specifies a sort key list)

XQuery borrows this idea In XQuery, what we order is the sequence of

“result tuples” output by the return clause:

for $x in document(“dblp.xml”)/proceedingsorder by $x/title/text()return $x

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What If Order Doesn’t Matter?

By default: SQL is unordered XQuery is ordered everywhere! But unordered queries are much faster to

answer

XQuery has a way of telling the DBMS to avoid preserving order: unordered {

for $x in (mypath) …}

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Distinct-ness

In XQuery, DISTINCT-ness happens as a function over a collection But since we have nodes, we can do duplicate

removal according to value or node Can do fn:distinct-values(collection) to remove

duplicate values, or fn:distinct-nodes(collection) to remove duplicate nodes

for $years in fn:distinct-values(doc(“dblp.xml”)//year/text()

return $years

46

Querying & Defining Metadata – Can’t Do This in SQL

Can get a node’s name by querying node-name():for $x in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/*return node-name($x)

Can construct elements and attributes using computed names:

for $x in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/*,$year in $x/year,$title in $x/title/text(),

element node-name($x) {attribute {“year-” + $year} { $title }

}

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XQuery Summary

Very flexible and powerful language for XML Clean and orthogonal: can always replace a

collection with an expression that creates collections

DB and document-oriented (we hope) The core is relatively clean and easy to

understand

Turing Complete – we’ll talk more about XQuery functions soon