TIMBER: A Native System for Querying XML

Stelios Paparizos, Shurug Al-Khalifa, Adriane Chapman, H. V. Jagadish, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Andrew Nierman, Jignesh M. Patel, Divesh Srivastava, Nuwee Wiwatwattana, Yuqing Wu, Cong Yu

Abstract: XML has become ubiquitous, and XML data has to be managed in databases. The current industry standard is to map XML data into relational tables and store this information in a relational database. Such mappings create both expressive power problems and performance problems.In the TIMBER [7] project we are exploring the issues involved in storing XML in native format. We believe that the key intellectual contribution of this system is a comprehensive set-at-a-time query processing ability in a native XML store, with all the standard components of relational query processing, including algebraic rewriting and a cost-based optimizer.