Solving the Intractable Problem: Optimal Performance for Worst Case Scenarios in XML Twig Pattern Matching

In the history of databases, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been thought of as the standard format to store and exchange semi-structured data. With the advent of IoT, XML technologies can play an important role in addressing the issue of processing a massive amount of data generated from heterogeneous devices. As the number and complexity of such datasets increases there is a need for algorithms which are able to index and retrieve XML data efficiently even for complex queries. In this context twig pattern matching, finding all occurrences of a twig pattern query (TPQ), is a core operation in XML query processing. Until now holistic joins have been considered the state-of-the-art TPQ processing algorithms, but they fail to guarantee an optimal evaluation except at the expense of excessive storage costs which limit their scope in large datasets. In this article, we introduce a new approach which significantly outperforms earlier methods in terms of both the size of the intermediate storage and query running time. The approach presented here uses Child Prime Labels (Alsubai & North, 2018) to improve the filtering phase of bottom-up twig matching algorithms and a novel algorithm which avoids the use of stacks, thus improving TPQs processing efficiency. Several experiments were conducted on common benchmarks such as DBLP, XMark and TreeBank datasets to study the performance of the new approach. Multiple analyses on a range of twig pattern queries are presented to demonstrate the statistical significance of the improvements.