Querying the File

Database systems are concerned with structured data. Unfortunately, data is often stored in an unstructured manner (e g in files) even when it does have a strong internal structure (e.g. electronic documents or programs). Unfortunately, data stored in files cannot benefit from database technology and in particular, has to rely on very primitive linguistic support. In this paper, we show how structured files can be queried using (high-level) database languages. In [2] (see Chapter 3.3.2) we address the problem of updates.