Abstract

This major report presents the design and implementation of XML data transfer, a tool for transferring data between heterogeneous data sources by using XML standards and the related technology. Relational database design focuses on decomposing a flat data structure to a normalized relational model. In reality, the real world objects can be modeled through many different ways as long as they represent the objects and relationship correctly. In today's software development world, multiple vendors have been implementing their own data model through practising the relational theory. Therefore, the data model dealing with the same real world objects are often different. The data exchange between these different software systems is extremely difficult due to the difference of the data models. To resolve the data exchange problem in integration and information sharing among different software systems, XML (Extensible Markup Language) becomes a natural selection as a means to relay the data in the information exchange process. In this report, data is transferred between two sample school administration database systems, which are semantically similar, but have different data models (i.e. schema representations). The transferring is carried out through an intermediate data model as the bridge between these two data sources. The intermediate data model is in XML data format. The mappings are via two XML schemas, one from the source school database to the intermediate data file, another is from the intermediate to the destination school database. The programs are developed using Microsoft .NET and C# programming language. The databases are built on Microsoft SQL Server.