Efficient processing of XML path queries based on BI index

XML has been widely used for information exchange and storage as the de facto data representation format nowadays. Several XML query languages such XPath, XQuery and XML-QL have been proposed. Many structural join algorithms have been proposed for processing XPath queries, Although holistic twig join algorithms has been proved to be I/O optimal in terms of input and output sizes for queries with only ancestor-descendant edges, it cannot control the size of intermediate results for queries with parent-child edges. We address the problem of efficient path queries with mixed of ancestor-descendant and parent-child edges on a simple but novel index, called BI (i.e. Binary Index) based on Dewey labeling scheme. And we propose a new holistic path join algorithm, namely PSBI, which has the same performance as PathStack for query path with only ancestor-descendant edges, but it is significantly more efficient than PathStack for queries with the presence of parent-child edges. Experimental results demonstrate that the PSBI and BI index has a substantial performance improvement compared to original PathStack algorithm.