MTree: an XML XPath graph index

• Authors: P. Mark Pettovello;Farshad Fotouhi
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing
• Year: 2006

This paper introduces the MTree index algorithm, a special purpose XML XPath index designed to meet the needs of the hierarchical XPath query language. With the increasing importance of XML, XPath, and XQuery, several methods have been proposed for creating XML structure indexes and many variants using relational technology have been proposed. This work proposes a new XML structure index, called MTree, which is designed to be optimal for traversing all XPath axes. The primary feature of MTree lies in its ability to provide the next subtree root node in document order, for all axes, to each context node in O(1). MTree is a special purpose XPath index structure that matches the special purpose query requirements for XPath. This approach is in contrast to other approaches that map the problem domain into general purpose index structures such as B-Tree that must reconstruct the XML tree from those structures for every query. MTree supports modification operations such as insert and delete. MTree has been implemented both in memory and on disk, and performance results using XMark benchmark data are presented showing up to two orders of magnitude improvement over other well-known implementations.