Incremental maintenance of XML structural indexes

Abstract

Increasing popularity of XML in recent years has generated much interest in query processing over graph-structured data. To support officient evaluation of path expressions, many structural indexes have been proposed. The most popular ones are the 1-index, based on the notion of graph bisimilarity, and the recently proposed A(k)-index, based on the notion of local similarity to provide a trade-off between index size and query answering power. For these indexes to be practical, we need effective and efficient incremental maintenance algorithms to keep them consistent with the underlying data. However, existing update algorithms for structural indexes essentially provide no guarantees on the quality of the index; the updated index is usually larger size than necessary, degrading the performance for subsequent queries. In this paper, we propose update algorithms for the 1-index and the A(k)-index with provable guarantees on the resulting index quality. Our algorithms always maintain a minimal index, i.e., merging any two index nodes would result in an incorrect index. For the 1-index, if the data graph is acyclic, our algorithm further ensures that the index is minimum, i.e., it has the least number of index nodes possible. For the A(k)-index, we show that the minimal index our algorithm maintains is also the unique minimum A(k)-index. for both acyclic and cyclic data graphs. Finally, through experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our algorithms bring significant improvement over previous methods, in terms of both index size and update time.