Structural Join and Staircase Join Algorithms of Sibling Relationship

The processing of XML queries can result in evaluation of various structural relationships. Efficient algorithms for evaluating ancestor-descendant and parent-child relationships have been proposed. Whereas the problems of evaluating preceding-sibling-following-sibling and preceding-following relationships are still open. In this paper, we studied the structural join and staircase join for sibling relationship. First, the idea of how to filter out and minimize unnecessary reads of elements using parent＇s structural information is introduced, which can be used to accelerate structural joins of parent-child and preceding-sibling-following-sibling relationships. Second, two efficient structural join algorithms of sibling relationship are proposed. These algorithms lead to optimal join performance： nodes that do not participate in the join can be judged beforehand and then skipped using B^＋-tree index. Besides, each element list joined is scanned sequentially once at most. Furthermore, output of join results is sorted in document order. We also discussed the staircase join algorithm for sibling axes. Studies show that, staircase join for sibling axes is close to the structural join for sibling axes and shares the same characteristic of high efficiency. Our experimental results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our optimizing techniques for sibling axes, but also validate the efficiency of our algorithms. As far as we know, this is the first work addressing this problem specially.

Path-partitioned encoding supports wildcard-awareness twig queries

Finding all occurrences of a twig query in an XML database is a core operation for efficient evaluation of XML queries. It is important to effiectively handle twig queries with wildcards. In this paper, a novel path-partitioned encoding scheme is proposed for XML documents to capture paths of all elements, and a twig query is modeled as an XPattern extended from tree pattern. After definition, simplification, normalization, verification and initialization of the XPattern, both work sets and a join plan are generated. According to these measures, an effiective algorithm to answer for a twig query, called DMTwig, is designed without unnecessary elements and invalid structural joins. The algorithm can adaptively deal with twig queries with branch ([ ]), child edge (/), descendant edge (//), and wildcard (*) synthetically. We show that path-partitioned encoding scheme and XPattern guarantee the I/O and CPU optimality for twig queries. Experiments on representative data set indicate that the proposed solution performs significantly.