06472 Abstracts Collection - XQuery Implementation Paradigms

From 19.11.2006 to 22.11.2006, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06472 ``XQuery Implementation Paradigms'' was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps

Relational query processors derive much of their effectiveness from the awareness of specific table properties like sort order, size, or absence of duplicate tuples. This text applies (and adapts) this successful principle to database-supported XML and XPath processing: the relational system is made tree aware, i.e., tree properties like subtree size, intersection of paths, inclusion or disjointness of subtrees are made explicit. We propose a local change to the database kernel, the staircase join, which encapsulates the necessary tree knowledge needed to improve XPath performance. Staircase join operates on an XML encoding which makes this knowledge available at the cost of simple integer operations (e.g., +, <=). We finally report on quite promising experiments with a staircase join enhanced main-memory database kernel

Report on the first Twente Data Management Workshop on XML Databases and Information Retrieval

The Database Group of the University of Twente initiated a new series of workshops called Twente Data Management workshops (TDM), starting with one on XML Databases and Information Retrieval which took place on 21 June 2004 at the University of Twente. We have set ourselves two goals for the workshop series: i) To provide a forum to share original ideas as well as research results on data management problems; ii) To bring together researchers from the database community and researchers from related research fields

Fast and Tiny Structural Self-Indexes for XML

XML document markup is highly repetitive and therefore well compressible using dictionary-based methods such as DAGs or grammars. In the context of selectivity estimation, grammar-compressed trees were used before as synopsis for structural XPath queries. Here a fully-fledged index over such grammars is presented. The index allows to execute arbitrary tree algorithms with a slow-down that is comparable to the space improvement. More interestingly, certain algorithms execute much faster over the index (because no decompression occurs). E.g., for structural XPath count queries, evaluating over the index is faster than previous XPath implementations, often by two orders of magnitude. The index also allows to serialize XML results (including texts) faster than previous systems, by a factor of ca. 2-3. This is due to efficient copy handling of grammar repetitions, and because materialization is totally avoided. In order to compare with twig join implementations, we implemented a materializer which writes out pre-order numbers of result nodes, and show its competitiveness.Comment: 13 page

VAMANA : A High Performance, Scalable and Cost Driven XPath Engine

Many applications are migrating or beginning to make use native XML data. We anticipate that queries will emerge that emphasize the structural semantics of XML query languages like XPath and XQuery. This brings a need for an efficient query engine and database management system tailored for XML data similar to traditional relational engines. While mapping large XML documents into relational database systems while possible, poses difficulty in mapping XML queries to the less powerful relational query language SQL and creates a data model mismatch between relational tables and semi-structured XML data. Hence native solutions to efficiently store and query XML data are being developed recently. However, most of these systems thus far fail to demonstrate scalability with large document sizes, to provide robust support for the XPath query language nor to adequately address costing with respect to query optimization. In this thesis, we propose a novel cost-driven XPath engine to support the scalable evaluation of ad-hoc XPath expressions called VAMANA. VAMANA makes use of an efficient XML repository for storing and indexing large XML documents called the Multi-Axis Storage Structure (MASS) developed at WPI. VAMANA extensively uses indexes for query evaluation by considering index-only plans. To the best of our knowledge, it is the only XML query engine that supports an index plan approach for large XML documents. Our index-oriented query plans allow queries to be evaluated while reading only a fraction of the data, as all tuples for a particular context node are clustered together. The pipelined query framework minimizes the cost of handing intermediate data during query processing. Unlike other native solutions, VAMANA provides support for all 13 XPath axes. Our schema independent cost model provides dynamically calculated statistics that are then used for intelligent cost-based transformations, further improving performance. Our optimization strategy for increasing execution time performance is affirmed through our experimental studies on XMark benchmark data. VAMANA query execution is significantly faster than leading available XML query engines