Many applications deal with highly flexible XML documents from different sources, which makes it difficult to define their structure by a fixed schema or a DTD. Therefore, it is necessary to explore ways how to cope with such XML documents. The paper analyzes different storage and retrieval methods for schemaless XML documents using the capabilities of relational systems. We compare our experiences gathered at the implementation of an XML-to-relation mapping with a LOB implementation in a

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... cial RDBMS. The paper concludes with a vision how different storage methods could converge towards a common high-level XML-API for databases.