Comparison of Complete and Elementless Native Storage of XML Documents
Because XML documents tend to be very large, are accessed by declarative and navigational languages, and often are processed in a collaborative way using read/write transactions, their fine-grained storage and management in XML DBMSs is a must for which, in turn, a flexible and space-economic tree representation is mandatory. In this paper, we explore a variety of options to natively store, encode, and compress XML documents thereby preserving the full DBMS processing flexibility on the documents required by the various language models and usage characteristics. Important issues of our empirical study are related to node labeling, document container layout, indexing, as well as structure and content compression. Encoding and compression of XML documents with their complete structure leads to a space consumption of ~40% to ~60% compared to their plain representation, whereas structure virtualization (elementless storage) saves in the average more than 10%, in addition.

title: An Adaptive Storage Manager for XML Documents
abstract: Effective and efficient management and manipulation of XML documents requires stable decisions at the time a document enters the XML DBMS to provide for storage structures which are adjusted to the document characteristics and which reflect the future processing needs. While some of the critical parameters require a kind of pre-specification, others can be determined by pre-analysis or sampling of the incoming document or by just making experience-driven “educated guesses”. Important parameters are related to node labeling, path synopsis, document container layout, and indexing. In this paper, we discuss approaches to achieve an adaptive behavior of the storage manager to provide tailor-made native XML storage structures to the extent possible.

title: Autonomous Management of Soft Indexes
abstract: In recent years the support for index tuning as pan of physical database design has gained focus in research and product development, which resulted in index and design advisors. Nevertheless, these tools provide a one-off solution for a continuous task and are not deeply integrated with the DBMS functionality by only applying the query optimizer for index recommendation and profit estimation and decoupling the decision about and execution of index configuration changes from the core system functionality. In this paper we propose an approach that continuously collects statistics for recommended indexes and based on this, repetitively solves the Index Selection Problem (lSP).A key novelty is the on-the-fly index generation during query processing implemented by new query plan operators In-dexBuildScan and SwitchPlan. Finally, we present the implementation and evaluation of the introduced concepts as part of the PostgreSQL system.

title: Usage-driven storage structures for native XML databases
abstract: There are numerous and influential parameters associated with the selection of suitable native storage structures for XML documents within an XML DBMS. The most important parameters are related to node labeling, path synopsis, document container layout, indexing, and text compression. While node labeling and the presence of a path synopsis greatly determine flexibility and efficiency of the entire DBMS-internal XML processing, the remaining issues primarily address I/O demand and space consumption. In particular, text compression---considered orthogonal to the design choices affected by the other parameters---implies additional algorithmic costs for encoding/decoding during document processing. Having the vision in mind that future storage managers can autonomously figure out optimal choices for all of these parameters, we discuss how various storage options favor different usage patterns and how they can be specified beforehand to influence native XML storage options by the anticipated usages.

title: Tailor-Made Native XML Storage Structures
abstract: Automatically choosing suitable native storage structures for XML doc- uments arriving at the XML DBMS is a challenging task for its storage manager. While some of the critical parameters require pre-specification, others can be deter- mined by pre-analysis or sampling of the incoming document or by just making ex- perience-driven "educated guesses". In this paper, we discuss approaches to achieve an adaptive behavior of the storage manager to provide tailor-made native XML stor- age structures to the extent possible. 1I ntroduction The XML data model allows for a great deal of modeling flexibility with which order, op- tional and multi-valued concepts, as well as deeply nested relationships can be captured. Therefore, the resulting tree structures of natively represented XML documents exhibit large variations in breadth and depth. Furthermore, XML documents may be data-centric having relatively little 'content' stored as short text values or they may be document-cen- tric where a single content node may contain huge portions of text, e.g., an entire book in a digital library. For these reasons, it is highly advisable to equip the storage manager with the ability to select reasonable or even optimal storage structures for documents. Furthermore, two cas- es have to be considered: a document sent by a client arrives at a time—the so-called block mode, i.e., the document can be pre-parsed and analyzed before a storage structure is cho- sen—or it arrives at the DBMS interface in stream mode where fragments present, due to their size, have to be allocated in a suitable storage structure on disk before the entire "streamed" document is available for the DBMS. In the latter case, the storage manager must decide—based on imprecise structural information—on the storage structure to be chosen and, at best, can make some educated guesses based on context or sampling infor- mation.

title: Essential Performance Drivers in Native XML DBMSs
abstract: As a multi-layered XML database management system, we have designed, implemented, and optimized over the recent five years our prototype system XTC, a native XDBMS providing multi-lingual query interfaces (XQuery, XPath, DOM). In particular in higher system layers, we have compared competing concepts and iteratively found salient solutions which drastically improved the overall XDBMS performance. XML query processing is critically affected by the smooth interplay of concepts and methods on all architectural layers: node labeling and mapping options for storage structures; availability of suitable index mechanisms; provision of a spectrum of path processing operators; query language compilation and optimization. Furthermore, effective and efficient locking protocols must be present to guarantee the ACID properties for XML processing and to achieve high transaction throughput. 
 
In this survey, we outline our experiences gained during the implementation and optimization of XTC. We figure out the "key drivers" to maximize throughput while keeping the response times at an acceptable level. Because we have implemented all options and alternatives in XTC, dedicated benchmark runs allow for comparisons in identical environments and illustrate the benefit of all implementation decisions.

title: Model-Checking with Coverability Graphs
abstract: We show that several formulas of a temporal logic can be verified using the coverability graph of the underlying system. Of course, the procedure is not capable of verifying all formulae, since already the reachability problem for (unbounded) Petri nets is computationally hard. Thus, the procedure returns true, false, or unknown for a query. The formulae that can be verified cover most of the well known standard properties which have been listed in the context of coverability graph analysis so far.

title: Stubborn sets for model checking the EF/AG fragment of CTL

title: How to calculate symmetries of Petri nets
abstract: Symmetric net structure yields symmetric net behaviour. Thus, knowing the symmetries of a net, redundant calculations can be skipped. We present a framework for the calculation of symmetries for several net classes including place/transition nets, timed nets, stochastic nets, self–modifying nets, nets with inhibitor arcs, and many others. Our approach allows the specification of different symmetry groups. Additionally it provides facilities either to calculate symmetries on demand while running the actual analysis algorithm, or to calculate them in advance. For the latter case we define and calculate a ground set of symmetries. Such a set has polynomial size and is sufficient for an efficient implementation of the for all symmetries loop and the partition of net elements into equivalence classes. These two constructions are the usual way to integrate symmetries into an analysis algorithm.

title: Distributed verification with LoLA
abstract: We report work in progress on a distributed version of explicit state space generation in the Petri net verification tool LoLA. We propose a data structure where all available memory of all involved workstations can be fully exploited, and load balancing actions are possible at any time while the verification is running. It is even possible to extend the set of involved workstations while a verification is running.

title: Narrowing Petri Net State Spaces Using the State Equation
abstract: Given a (possibly partially defined) state, all count vectors of transition sequences reaching that state are solutions to a corresponding Petri net state equation. We propose a search strategy where sequences corresponding to a minimal solution of the state equation are explored first. Then step by step the search space is relaxed to arbitrary count vectors. This heuristics relies on the observation that in many (though provably not in all) cases, minimal solutions of the state equation can be realized as a firing sequence. If no target state is reachable, either the state equation does not have solutions, or our search method would yield the full state space. We study the impact of the state equation on reachability, present an algorithm that exploits information from the state equation and discuss its application in stateless search as well as its combination with stubborn set reduction.