Modeling Nested Relationships in XML Documents Using Relational Databases

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Abstract Structural joins, i.e., operations that determine all occurrences of parent/child or ancestor/descendant relationships between node sets, are at the heart of XML management systems. To perform these joins, the systems exploit the information about the nested relationships between elements, attributes, and pieces of text in XML documents. Since performing the structural joins is often the most time-consuming phase in query evaluation, the method chosen to model the nested relationships has a considerable impact on the overall effectiveness of any XML management system. In this paper, we discuss four different methods for modeling the nested relationships using relational databases. We also propose a novel modeling method and present the results of our comprehensive performance experiments.