In-place XML schema evolution occurs by evaluating an existing XML schema in a database system to see if it is compatible with a new XML schema. To determine if the old schema is compatible with the new schema, a lock-step traversal is performed on the two schemas. Each instruction in the old schema is compared to instructions in the new schema. Detected differences between the two schemas are evaluated to determine if existing XML documents are still compatible with the new schema. If they are, then an in-place schema evolution operation can take place. The in-place schema operation basically, involves appending the updated object information to the underlying object type and preserving the order of elements in a document by storing element mapping information on disk.