Adaptive structural index for efficient processing of XML path queries

This paper proposes an adaptive structural index: AS-Index (adaptive structural index), which can avoid the problem of the existing indexes. AS-Index is based on F & B-Index. It consists of F & B-Index, Query-Table and Part-Table. Frequent queries are kept in Query-Table avoiding redundant operations in query processing. Based on Query-Table an efficient bottom-up query processing is also proposed for answering infrequent queries using the frequent queries in Query-Table. Part-Table is used for optimizing the queries with descendant edges. The existing adaptive structural indexes need to traverse the whole document for adaptation, and their adaptation granularity is XML element node. For AS-Index, the adaptation granularity is F & B-Index node which includes a set of XML element nodes, and its adaptation is an efficient and incremental process that supports branch queries. The experimental results demonstrate that this index significantly outperforms the previous structural indexes in terms of query processing and adaptation efficiencies. For large XML documents, compared with the existing adaptive structural indexes, AS-Index is more scalable.