An XPATH query processor for a decomposition storage scheme

Abstract

XML is a markup language that is widely accepted as a standard way of information sharing and exchange, especially on the Web. One of the recent database research issues is to devise ways of storing XML documents as well as retrieving them efficiently. In this paper, we present an XPath query processor that can be used for retrieving XML documents that are stored in a relational database by a decomposition storage scheme. Our XPath query processor, when given an XPath query, translates it to appropriate SQL statements. The SQL query results are then transformed to a DOM tree that is a way of representing part of an XML document. The proposed query processor is optimized for element range queries by using DFS numbers along with path expressions. We evaluated the performance of the proposed query processor using XML documents of various sizes and common types of XML queries. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.