Designing XML Database

Question

Hello,
I'm in the process of designing a relatively large XML DB System and I'm having some doubts regarding the best structure for the main XML document, in order to optimize search as well as organizing the document in such a way that is not relational (as I usually tend to think when designing an XML DB, for background reasons).
Basically, we're trying to create a single XML document, but there's a lot of information spread in other entities and tables. We´re trying to minimize the tables and aggregate as much information as possible in a single XML file, to avoid any "relational" query, but also without getting redundant. To illustrate what I mean, here is an example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doc>
     <people>
          <person>
               <name> Johnny </name>
               <address> St. Street, 444 </address>
          </person>
          <person>
               <name> Tom </name>
               <address> Mr. Street, 444 </address>
          </person>
          <person>
               <name> Cat </name>
               <address> Dr. Street, 444 </address>
          </person>
     </people>
     <vehicle>
          <driver>
               <!-- redundant information, like above -->
               <person>
                    <name> Johnny </name>
                    <address> St. Street, 444 </address>
               </person>
          </driver>
     </vehicle>
</doc>As you can see above, we have some redundant information repeated. Also, most importantly, I have no way of having some referencial integrity. Now, in the next example, I have tried adding a reference, using an ID node in the person element, in order to avoid the redundancy and get some integrity:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doc>
     <people>
          <person id="10">
              <name> Johnny </name>
               <address> St. Street, 444 </address>
          </person>
          <person id="11">
               <name> Tom </name>
               <address> Mr. Street, 444 </address>
          </person>
          <person id="12">
               <name> Cat </name>
               <address> Dr. Street, 444 </address>
          </person>
     </people>
     <vehicle>
          <driver>
               <!-- storing just an ID reference> -->
               <person>
                    <id>10</id>
               </person>
          </driver>
     </vehicle>
</doc>But that's my point: am I thinking "relational" here? Is there any other way to solve this, in a more efficient and secure way?
best regards,
- Breno

Answer 1

You may like to take a look at HyperJAXB that I have used recently for a structure similar to yours. In HyperJAXB, you use JAXB binding with Hibernate on relational databas. So that you can get the results as XML document but you can also leverage relational database structure. And you can control all that without writing any code by adding annotations to XML schema document.
-- Deha Peker