A Join Index for XML Data Warehouses

XML data warehouses form an interesting basis for decision-support applications that exploit complex data. However, native-XML database management systems (DBMSs) currently bear limited performances and it is necessary to research for ways to optimize them. In this paper, we propose a new join index that is specifically adapted to the multidimensional architecture of XML warehouses. It eliminates join operations while preserving the information contained in the original warehouse. A theoretical study and experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our join index. They also show that native XML DBMSs can compete with XML-compatible, relational DBMSs when warehousing and analyzing XML data.Comment: 2008 International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 08), Niagra Falls : Canada (2008

Challenging Ubiquitous Inverted Files

Stand-alone ranking systems based on highly optimized inverted file structures are generally considered ‘the’ solution for building search engines. Observing various developments in software and hardware, we argue however that IR research faces a complex engineering problem in the quest for more flexible yet efficient retrieval systems. We propose to base the development of retrieval systems on ‘the database approach’: mapping high-level declarative specifications of the retrieval process into efficient query plans. We present the Mirror DBMS as a prototype implementation of a retrieval system based on this approach