• Journal of KIISE:Databases
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.334-343
• /
• 2005

Complex queries such as path alld twig patterns have been the focus of much research on processing XML data. Structural join algorithms use a form of encoded structural information for elements in an XML document to facilitate join processing. Recently, structural join algorithms such as Twigstack and TSGeneric- have been developed to process such complex queries, and they have been shown that the processing costs of the algorithms are linearly proportional to the sum of input data. However, the algorithms have a shortcoming that their processing costs increase with the length of a queery. To overcome the shortcoming, we propose the segment join technique to augment the structural join with structural indexes such as the 1-Index. The SegmentTwig algorithm based on the segment join technique performs joins between a pair of segments, which is a series of query nodes, rather than joins between a pair of query nodes. Consequently, the query can be processed by reading only a query node per segment. Our experimental study shorts that segment join algorithms outperform the structural join methods consistently and considerably for various data sets.