Model for dynamic and hierarchical data repository in relational database

Abstract

The aim of this research is to build an open schema model for a digital sources repository in a relational database. This required us to develop a few advanced techniques. One of them was to keep and maintain a hierarchical data structure pushed into the repository. A second was to create constraints on any hierarchical level that allows for the enforcement of data integrity and consistency. The created solution is mainly based on a JSON file as a native column type, which was designed for holding open schema documents. In this paper, we present a model for any repository that uses hierarchical dynamic data. Additionally, we include a structure for normalizing the input and description for the data in order to keep all of the model assumptions. We compared our solution with a well-known open schema model – Entity-Attribute-Value - in the scope of saving data and querying about relationships and contents from the structure. The results show that we achieved improvements in both the performance and disk space usage, as we extended our model with a few new features that the previous model does not include. The techniques developed in this research can be applied in every domain where hierarchical dynamic data is required, as demonstrated by the digital book repository that we have presented.