XML Data Managment 2009/2010 - Sample questions

1. Let's discuss your solution to assignment X (or, if you didn't do it,
come up with a sketch of a solution).

2. Explain XML markup concepts: elements and attributes, entity declarations
and references, processing instructions, comments, character data sections.
Provide examples.

3. What's the purpose of schemas?

4. What is the difference between well-formedness and validity?

5. Given an XML Document, how would you check its well-formedness and/or
validity? 

6. What schema languages do you know? Explain some of differences between them.

7. Given this DTD (I'm going to show you a DTD of a few lines), can
you write a XML document that validates against it?

8. What are some of the advantages of XML Schema over DTD?

9. Compare XML Schemas versus relational database schemas.

10. List some elements available in XHTML. How would you check the validity
of an XHTML document?

11. What are CSS and what's there purpose?

12. Explain the concept of selectors in CSS.

13. Explain the difference between event-based parsers and tree-based parsers.
What about SAX and DOM?

14. What does the following Java code do (I'm going to show you a few lines
of Java code that uses the SAX or DOM API)?

15. What is XPath? Can you provide an example of an XPath location? Given
this XML document (I'm going to show you a short XML document), can you provide
an XPath location that selects this element (I'm going to pick one) and explain
how it works?

16. Discuss differences between an XPath location and the SQL SELECT statement.

17. What tools do you know that support XPath location querying?

18. What is XSLT used for? Provide an example where you would use XSLT in a
software project.

19. What strategies do you know for mapping a tree to a table in a relational
database? How would you query the resulting tables to find subtrees of a given
node?

20. To what extend does Postgres support XML? Provide a short list of XML
features available in current versions of Postgres.

21. Discuss the different approaches: in what cases would you store data in
XML format and in what cases would you rather store data in a trational
relational schema.

22. What XML related technologies does eXist implement? Explain a use case
of XQuery.