Performance Comparison of Relational and Native-XML Databases using the Semantics of the Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM)

Efforts to improve the military decision and action cycle have centered on automating the command and control process and improving interoperability among joint and coalition forces. However, information automation by itself can lead to increased operator overload when the way this information is stored and presented is not structured and consistently filtered. The majority of messaging systems store information in a document-centric free-text format that makes it difficult for command and control systems, relational databases, software agents and web portals to intelligently search the information. Consistent structure and semantic meaning is essential when integrating these capabilities. Military-grade implementations must also provide high performance. A widely accepted platform-independent technology standard for representing document-centric information is the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML supports the structured representation of information in context through the use of metadata. By using an XML Schema generated from MIP’s Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM), it is feasible to compare the syntactic strength of human-readable XML documents with the semantics of LC2IEDM as used within a relational database. The insert, update, retrieve and delete performance of a native-XML database is compared against that of a relational database management system (RDBMS) implementing the same command and control data model (LC2IEDM). Additionally, compression and parsing performance advantages of using various binary XML compression schemes is investigated. Experimental measurements and analytic comparisons are made to determine whether the performance of a native-XML database is a disadvantage to the use of XML. Finally, because of the globally significant potential of these interoperability improvements, a number of look-ahead items to future work are proposed including the use of JC3IEDM.