Early evaluating XML trees in object repositories

Abstract

Data on the Internet are usually represented and transfered as XML. The XML data is represented as a tree and therefore, object repositories are well-suited to store and query them due to their modeling power. XML queries are represented as regular path expressions and evaluated by traversing each object of the tree in object repositories. Several indexes are proposed to fast evaluate regular path expressions. However, in some cases they may not cover all possible paths because they require a great amount of disk space. In order to efficiently evaluate the queries in such cases, we propose an signature based block traversing which combines the signature method and block traversing. The signature approach shrink the search space by using the signature information attached to each object, which hints the existence of a certain label in the sub-tree. The block traversing reduces disk I/O by early evaluating the reachable objects in a page. We conducted diverse experiments to show that the hybrid approach achieves a better performance than the other naive ones. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.