Accelerating XPath evaluation in any RDBMS

Abstract

This article is a proposal for a database index structure, the XPath accelerator , that has been specifically designed to support the evaluation of XPath path expressions. As such, the index is capable to support all XPath axes (including ancestor, following, preceding-sibling, descendant-or-self, etc.). This feature lets the index stand out among related work on XML indexing structures which had a focus on the child and descendant axes only. The index has been designed with a close eye on the XPath semantics as well as the desire to engineer its internals so that it can be supported well by existing relational database query processing technology: the index (a) permits set-oriented (or, rather, sequence-oriented) path evaluation, and (b) can be implemented and queried using well-established relational index structures, notably B-trees and R-trees.We discuss the implementation of the XPath accelerator on top of different database backends and show that the index performs well on all levels of the memory hierarchy, including disk-based and main-memory based database systems.