Managing MEDLINE: A Comparison of a
Native XML Database System with a Relational Database System
The
rapid growth of public literature databases like MEDLINE has created the need
to efficiently store, retrieve and update the millions of scholarly articles
and literature they contain. We believe using alternative database systems like
Native XML databases (NXD) will greatly speed up the update process
significantly. We used existing and self-developed software packages to parse
and load the 2006 release of MEDLINE into two different database systems,
namely a NXD (Berkeley DB) and a relational database system (PostgreSQL). The two systems were compared using data
collected on loading and parsing times, disk-space utilization and query
performance. The NXD offered a significantly faster performance in terms of
data parsing and loading times. It was also easier to update and maintain,
compared to the relational database system. However, in comparison, the
relational database system we tested offered better performance in querying
large datasets and was also significantly lower on
disk-space utilization.
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