Efficient structural joins on indexed XML documents

  • Authors:

  • Shu-Yao Chien;Zografoula Vagena;Donghui Zhang;Vassilis J. Tsotras;Carlo Zaniolo

  • Affiliations:

  • CS Dept., UCLA;CES Dept., UC Riverside;CES Dept., UC Riverside;CES Dept., UC Riverside;CS Dept., UCLA

  • Venue:
  • VLDB '02 Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Very Large Data Bases
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Queries on XML documents typically combine selections on element contents, and, via path expressions, the structural relationships between tagged elements. Structural joins are used to find all pairs of elements satisfying the primitive structural relationships specified in the query, namely, parent-child and ancestor-descendant relationships. Efficient support for structural joins is thus the key to efficient implementations of XML queries. Recently proposed node numbering schemes enable the capturing of the XML document structure using traditional indices (such as B+-trees or R-trees). This paper proposes efficient structural join algorithms in the presence of tag indices. We first concentrate on using B+- trees and show how to expedite a structural join by avoiding collections of elements that do not participate in the join. We then introduce an enhancement (based on sibling pointers) that further improves performance. Such sibling pointers are easily implemented and dynamically maintainable. We also present a structural join algorithm that utilizes R-trees. An extensive experimental comparison shows that the B+-tree structural joins are more robust. Furthermore, they provide drastic improvement gains over the current state of the art.