On the Complexity of Nonrecursive XQuery and Functional Query Languages on Complex Values

Summary: Tight combined-complexity for recursion-free functional queries on complex values: monad algebra with atomic equality is TA[2^O(n),O(n)]-complete; its monotone fragment is NEXPTIME-complete; deep equality admits TA lower and EXPSPACE upper bounds. Core XQuery (child-only) is expressively equivalent to list monad algebra and inherits these combined complexities, while fixed-query data complexity lies in TC0. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1342
Venue: PODS
Year: 2005
Pagerank: 6.5549225e-05
Overall Rank: 4,702 | 67.75%
DOI: 10.1145/1065167.1065179

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christoph Koch (Vienna University of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{koch_pods05,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '05},
        title = {{On the Complexity of Nonrecursive XQuery and Functional Query Languages on Complex Values}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1065167.1065179},
        doi = {10.1145/1065167.1065179},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Koch, Christoph},
        year = {2005}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,047	Behavioral Simulations in MapReduce	2010	VLDB	6.9380465e-05
6,193	Incremental View Maintenance For Collection Programming	2016	PODS	5.9471978e-05
7,270	A Crash Course on Database Queries	2007	PODS	5.6595955e-05
7,480	The GCX System: Dynamic Buffer Minimization in Streaming XQuery Evaluation	2007	VLDB	5.6081446e-05
7,654	Positive Higher-Order Queries	2010	PODS	5.5746273e-05
11,362	Synthesizing Nested Relational Queries from Implicit Specifications	2023	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
140	Remarks on the Algebra of Non First Normal Form Relations	1982	PODS	0.00029686538
544	A New Approach to Database Logic	1984	PODS	0.00016792556
666	Efficient Algorithms for Processing XPath Queries	2002	VLDB	0.00015166582
1,082	A Transducer-Based XML Query Processor	2002	VLDB	0.00012257574
1,155	Projecting XML Documents	2003	VLDB	0.00011933524
1,505	The BEA/XQRL Streaming XQuery Processor	2003	VLDB	0.00010547865
2,132	The Complexity of XPath Query Evaluation	2003	PODS	9.119436e-05
2,461	Towards Tractable Algebras for Bags (Extended Abstract)	1993	PODS	8.550394e-05
2,701	Possibilities and Limitations of Using Flat Operators in Nested Algebra Expressions	1988	PODS	8.240179e-05
2,864	Typing and Querying XML Documents: Some Complexity Bounds	2003	PODS	8.0195639e-05
2,986	Tractable Query Languages for Complex Object Databases	1991	PODS	7.8912631e-05
3,128	On Accessing Object-Oriented Databases: Expressive Power, Complexity, and Restrictions	1989	SIGMOD	7.7292081e-05
3,519	Schema-based Scheduling of Event Processors and Buffer Minimization for Queries on Structured Data Streams	2004	VLDB	7.3506617e-05
6,184	Expressive power and data complexity of nonrecursive query languages for lists and trees (Extended Abstract)	2000	PODS	5.9488379e-05
6,661	Complexity of Nonrecursive Logic Programs with Complex Values	1998	PODS	5.8101181e-05
7,086	A Query Language for NC	1994	PODS	5.7073076e-05

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2	13,040	Investigation of Algebraic Query Optimisation for Database Programming Languages	1994	VLDB
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