XDB3 Extension for Equality and Relational Operators

While keyword full-text searches work well for textual data, they do not work well for numeric, date, or other more highly structured information. In particular, Netmark/XDB could retrieve any record where the author contained “Knight” in the text, but could not return only those records from Calendar Year 2010 that have “Knight” in their author section. Traditional relational databases allow for rich comparison “relational” operators; for example, one can express a query such as “return all rows where the signature date is on January 1, 2010.” Netmark/XDB, being primarily targeted at XML processing and retrieving XML-structured data, was designed for full-text querying to find keywords. Most other XML indexing and querying systems also are designed with the assumption that content (“CDATA”) is textual or binary data that can be queried against, but not with relational comparison operators like “greater than a value.”