| abstract |
Accessible persistent data is stored in file systems or databases. While the first provide an easy and well-understood interface to the data, they lack important features of the second like, for example, the ability to query the data. In the past, important features like recovery or index structures have been ported from databases to modern file systems. It comes as no surprise that leading researchers, like Jim Gray(1), and major enterprises, like Microsoft and its vision of WinFS(2), see both worlds colliding. However the relational database model is too static to store arbitrary content on-the-fly. Maybe with the rise of XML the time is ripe for merging filesystems into database management systems. With their increased flexibility, the information contained in files and file systems can be expressed as (an) XML document(s) and stored in an XML-aware database. Our current research is threefold: Part one examines the representation of file system content as XML documents, secondly we study the mapping of file system operations to their corresponding XPath/XQuery expressions and last, but not least, we evaluate state-of-the-art XML-aware databases dealing with documents representing file systems. (1) Speaking of a "file system/database détente" at USENIX FAST 2005. (2) WinFS is a relational database that represents itself to the operating system as a file storage subsystem.
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