XPath and XQuery Full Text Standard and Its Support in RDBMSs

Abstract

Full-text queries search information in documents using words and several special operators. Therefore, the search process operates on documents, and returning results are again documents. XQuery Full Text search provides a narrower form of full-text queries, while the search process operates on parts of XML documents, such as elements and attributes.In this paper, we discuss first XPath and XQuery Full Text specified in the W3C standard. Features, described in the standard, are separated in several groups and described using examples. After that, we show to what extent these features are supported in RDBMSs. The summary of the paper lists semantic similarities and differences of Full Text features described in the standard on one side and features, which are supported in the recent versions of IBM DB2, Oracle and MS SQL Server on the other. This part of the paper shows also that the syntax of the features described in the standard has not been supported by any of the considered systems.