Isolation in XML Bases

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is well accepted in many different application areas. As a consequence, there is an increasing need for persistently storing XML documents. As soon as many users and applications work concurrently on the same collection of XML documents - i.e. an XML base - isolating accesses and modifications of different transactions becomes an important issue. We discuss six different core protocols for synchronizing access to and modifications of XML document collections. These core protocols synchronize structure traversals and modifications. They are meant to be integrated into a native XML base management System (XBMS). Four of the six core protocols are based on two phase locking, one uses time stamps, and the last one uses a novel dynamic commit-ordering approach. The latter two protocols achieve a higher degree of concurrency by a novel implicit representation of multiple versions. We also discuss extensions of these core protocols to full-fledged protocols. Further, we show how the two phase locking based protocols can achieve a higher degree of concurrency by exploiting the semantics expressed in Document Type Definitions (DTDs).