Migration of the XML Detector Description Data and Schema to a Relational Database

This document discusses the design and implementation of software for migration of the XML detector description data to a relational database maintaining the semantic structure. Relational databases offer great flexibility for data consistency, manipulation and retrieval and offer a very well developed and easy to use query language. XML on the other hand offers great flexibility for data description and is a platform independent data format but lacks very efficient data selection and retrieval mechanisms. Relational databases also allows for management on the data level, while XML limits data management to the file level. The migration software tries to achieve migration between XML and the relational format in an effort to achieve the "best of both worlds".