Put a Tree Pattern in Your Algebra

To address the needs of data intensive XML applications, a number of efficient tree pattern algorithms have been proposed. Still, most XQuery compilers do not support those algorithms. This is due in part to the lack of support for tree patterns in XML algebras, but also because deciding which part of a query plan should be evaluated as a tree pattern is a hard problem. In this paper, we extend a tuple algebra for XQuery with a tree pattern operator, and present rewrit-ings suitable to introduce that operator in query plans. We demonstrate the robustness of the proposed rewritings under syntactic variations commonly found in queries. The proposed tree pattern operator can be implemented using popular algorithms such as Twig joins and Staircase joins. Our experiments yield useful information to decide which algorithm should be used in a given plan.