18th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications Synopsis Data Structures for XML Databases: Models, Issues, and Research Perspectives Angela Bonifati Alfredo Cuzzocrea Icar CNR, Italian National Research Council Icar CNR, Italian National Research Council & Via P. Bucci 41C, I-87036 Rende, Italy DEIS, University of Calabria
[email protected] Via P. Bucci 41C, I-87036 Rende, Italy
[email protected] Abstract in nature and not prone to be represented as a set of rela- tions or objects; (ii) quite often, XML documents appear Due to the lack of efficient native XML database man- in a schema-less fashion (e.g., like those of corporate B2B agement systems, XML data manipulation and query eval- and B2C e-commerce Web systems), thus making the rela- uation may be resource-consuming, and represent a bottle- tional translation more difficult; (iii) the inherent “richness” neck for several computationally intensive applications. To of the standard XML query language, which defines a com- overcome the above limitations, a possible solution consists prehensive class of queries with possibly complex syntax in computing synopsis data structures from XML databases, and predicates (e.g., for clause of XQuery queries [6], twig i.e. compressed representations providing a “succinct” de- XML queries [7], partial- and exact-match XPath queries scription of the original databases while ensuring low com- [8] etc.); (iv) the ambiguity of the XML semantics during putational overhead and high accuracy for many XML pro- query evaluation [20]; (v) problematic update management cessing tasks. Specifically, these data structures are very issues posed by processing XML data [2, 3, 31].