Identifying query incompatibilities with evolving XML schemas

Abstract

During the life cycle of an XML application, both schemas and queries may change from one version to another. Schema evolutions may affect query results and potentially the validity of produced data. Nowadays, a challenge is to assess and accommodate the impact of these changes in evolving XML applications. Such questions arise naturally in XML static analyzers. These analyzers often rely on decision procedures such as inclusion between XML schemas, query containment and satisfiability. However, existing decision procedures cannot be used directly in this context. The reason is that they are unable to distinguish information related to the evolution from information corresponding to bugs. This paper proposes a predicate language within a logical framework that can be used to make this distinction.We present a system for monitoring the effect of schema evolutions on the set of admissible documents and on the results of queries. The system is very powerful in analyzing various scenarios where the result of a query may not be anymore what was expected. Specifically, the system is based on a set of predicates which allow a fine-grained analysis for a wide range of forward and backward compatibility issues. Moreover, the system can produce counterexamples and witness documents which are useful for debugging purposes. The current implementation has been tested with realistic use cases, where it allows identifying queries that must be reformulated in order to produce the expected results across successive schema versions.

Methodology for Design and Evolution of XML Schemas using Conceptual Modeling

“…Paper [14] gives recommendations on how to write queries that do not need to be adapted for an evolving schema. In [9] the authors consider a subset of XPath 1.0 for which they study the impact changes in an XML schema.…”

DaemonX

“…Paper [38] gives recommendations on how to write queries that do not need to be adapted for an evolving schema. On the other hand, in [24] the authors consider a subset of XPath 1.0 constructs and study the impact of XML schema changes on them.…”