XML & Databases Virtual Laboratory Workshop (XML&DB VLW)

Part A: Pre-Teaching Material

Step-A1: Virtual workshop participants should be aware of the reading material, which is available in the relevant bibliography View Download as well as the provided pre-teaching material View Download

Step-A2: Study XML Schema Definition. An interactive lab on XML basics of Andrew Cumming from Edinburgh Napier University

Step-A3: An Instructor' s guide View Download is also available for this VLW.

Part B: Tutorial (Theoretical) Introduction

Step-B1: Tutorial XML, SQL/XML and the Big Three:

Step-B2: Tutorial Exercises:

Step-B3: You can download samples and study additional exercises View Download.

Step-B4: Check your answers in the additional exercises with the corrected version.

Part C: Hands-On Laboratory

Purpose of these documents is to introduce some detailed XML topics and provide lab exercises for hands-on studying of the subject using a mainstream RDBMS system.

Step-C1: All vendors of the mainstream RDBMS systems, DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server, are offering free Express editions of these products, which all provide the same XML functionalities as the commercial editions of the same products. For the first version of this tutorial and virtual workshop on “XML and Databases” we use Ubuntu 7.10 Linux platform running on VMware Player virtual machine, and on this platform we have DB2 Express-C 9.5 with its graphical tools. The virtual environment has been set up for us by IBM Finland, and all these products come under licenses of the vendors, free of charge. The whole package can be downloaded for free from our web site http://www.DBTechNet.org/download/VMware_Ubuntu_DB2Lab.zip, unzip the contents to some working directory and see the DB2Lab_readme.pdf file for more details on installing the environment.

Step-C2: Download the XML_Samples_for_XMLBasics.zip which contains samples of XML documents needed to perform the first part of the Hands-on laboratory “XML Basics” View Download.

Step-C3: Work on Hands-on laboratory Exercise “XML Basics” View Download that relates to XML schema definition

Step-C4: Work on Hands-on laboratory Exercise “Integration of XML in DB2 Express” View Download that relates to the use of XML data in DB2 express RDBMS

Step-C5: Work on Hands-on laboratory Exercise “Querying XML Data with XPath/XQuery and SQL/XML” View Download that relates to the querying languages XQuery and SQL/XML.

Part D: Post-teaching Material

Step-D1: You can train yourself with our self-assessment Multiple Choice Questions

* The DBTech EXT project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author(s), and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein