SUCXENT: An Efficient Path-Based Approach to Store and Query XML Documents

Abstract

This paper describes Sucxent, a novel system for the storage and querying of XML data using a relational database system (RDBMS). The relational schema proposed under Sucxent does not require the knowledge of the DTDs of the XML documents being stored. In this approach we store only the leaf nodes and their text values together with their ancestor list. Doing so will eliminate θ (< or >)-joins to answer XPath-expression based queries. θ-joins account for a major performance bottleneck in current approaches for storing XML data in an RDBMS. We also compare the performance of our system to two existing approaches for relational storage of XML documents, XRel and XParent, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We show that our system performs significantly better than XRel and XParent in terms of insertion, extraction and querying of XML documents.