Efficient filtering of XML documents with XPath expressions

We propose a novel index structure, termed XTrie, that supports the efficient filtering of XML documents based on XPath expressions. Our XTrie index structure offers several novel features that snake it especially attractive for large-scale publish/subscribe systems. First, XTrie is designed to support effective filtering based on complex XPath expressions (as opposed to simple, single-path specifications). Second, our XTrie structure and algorithms are designed to support both ordered arid unordered snatching of XML data. Third, by indexing on sequences of element names organized in a trio structure arid using a sophisticated snatching algorithm, XTrie is able to both reduce the number of unnecessary index probes as well as avoid redundant matchings, thereby providing extremely efficient filtering. Our experimental results over a wide range of XML document and XPath expression workloads demonstrate that our XTrie index stricture outperforms earlier approaches by wide margins.