XML is an emerging standard for data representation and exchange on the Web. XML is represented as a tree and the query as a regular path expression (RPE). The query is evaluated by traversing each node of the tree. Several indexes are proposed for RPEs for fast retrieval. In some cases these indexes may not cover all possible paths because of storage requirements. In this paper, we propose a signature-based query optimization technique to minimize the number of nodes retrieved from the database when the indexes cannot be used. The signature is a hint attached to each node, and is used to prune unnecessary sub-trees as early as possible when traversing nodes. For this goal, we propose the SigDAQ which is a signature-based DOM (s-DOM) as a storage model and a signature-based query executor (s-NFA). Our experimental results show that the signature method outperforms the original.
['Sang-Won Park', 'Hyoung-Joo Kim']
SigDAQ: an enhanced XML query optimization technique