Analytical processing of XML documents: Opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has been a valuable tool for analyzing trends in business information. While the multi-dimensional cube model used by OLAP is ideal for analyzing structured business data, it is not suitable for representing and analyzing complex semi-structured data, such as XML documents. Need for analyzing XML documents is gaining urgency as XML has become the language of choice for data representation across a wide range of application domains. This paper describes a proposal for analyzing XML documents using the abstract XML tree model. We argue that OLAP's multi-dimensional aggregation operators can not express structurally complex analytical operations on XML documents. Hence, we outline new extensions to XQuery for supporting such complex analytical operations. Finally, we discuss various challenges in implementing XML analysis in a real system.