Implementing a Scalable XML Publish/Subscribe System Using a Relational Database System

An XML publish/subscribe system needs to match many XPath queries (subscriptions) over published XML documents. The performance and scalability of the matching algorithm is essential for the system when the number of XPath subscriptions is large. Earlier solutions to this problem usually built large finite state automata for all the XPath subscriptions in memory. The scalability of this approach is limited by the amount of available physical memory. In this paper, we propose an implementation that uses a relational database as the matching engine. The heavy lifting part of evaluating a large number of subscriptions is done inside a relational database using indices and joins. We described several different implementation strategies and presented a performance evaluation. The system shows very good performance and scalability in our experiments, handling millions of subscriptions with moderate amount of physical memory.