XSeq: An Index Infrastructure for Tree Pattern Queries

Given a tree-pattern query, most XML indexing approaches decompose it into multiple sub-queries, and then join their results to provide the answer to the original query. Join operations have been identified as the most time-consuming component in XML query processing. XSeq is a powerful XML indexing infrastructure which makes tree patterns a first class citizen in XML query processing. Unlike most indexing methods that directly manipulate tree structures, XSeq builds its indexing infrastructure on a much simpler data model: sequences. That is, we represent both XML data and XML queries by structure-encoded sequences. We have shown that this new data representation preserves query equivalence [9], and more importantly, through subsequence matching, structured queries can be answered directly without resorting to expensive join operations. Moreover, the XSeq infrastructure unifies indices on both the content and the structure of XML documents, hence it achieves an additional performance advantage over methods indexing either just content or structure, or indexing them separately. XSeq originated from our early work ViST [10], which introduced sequence-based XML indexing. We refer the readers to [9] for the latest theoretical and technical details of XSeq.