Finding all the occurrences of a twig pattern specified by a selection predicate on multiple elements in an XML document is a core operation for efficient evaluation of XML queries. Holistic twig join algorithms were proposed recently as an optimal solution when the twig pattern only involves ancestordescendant relationships. In this paper, we address the problem of efficient processing of holistic twig joins on all/partly indexed XML documents. In particular, we propose an algorithm that utilizes available indices on element sets. While it can be shown analytically that the proposed algorithm is as efficient as the existing state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of worst case I/O and CPU cost, experimental results on various datasets indicate that the proposed index-based algorithm performs significantly better than the existing ones, especially when binary structural joins in the twig pattern have varying join selectivities.
Reference REF is the only other paper that really addresses the problem of choosing which index cursor to move next in a holistic twig join.
Holistic Twig Joins on Indexed XML Documents
VLDB
Computer Science