Why Off-the-Shelf RDBMSs are Better at XPath Than You Might Expect

Summary: Off-the-shelf RDBMSs can handle XPath without kernel changes. Partitioned B-trees speed axes; aggregation-based pruning avoids duplicates; optimizer rewritings enable efficient XPath evaluation on DBMS; IBM DB2 experiments confirm practicality. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 3919
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 4.6904624e-05
Overall Rank: 7,639 | 46.86%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,097	Join Query Optimization Techniques for Complex Event Processing Applications	2018	VLDB	5.7011496e-05
8,934	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD	4.427232e-05
12,305	Cost Based Plan Selection for XPath	2009	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
12,412	Implementing Filesystems by Tree-aware DBMSs	2008	VLDB	4.1945683e-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
98	XMark: A Benchmark for XML Data Management	2002	VLDB	0.00050023808
153	Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities	1999	VLDB	0.00040784455
193	On Supporting Containment Queries in Relational Database Management Systems	2001	SIGMOD	0.00035610321
240	Holistic Twig Joins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching	2002	SIGMOD	0.00031603463
391	Indexing and Querying XML Data for Regular Path Expressions	2001	VLDB	0.00024564567
446	Storing and Querying Ordered XML Using a Relational Database System	2002	SIGMOD	0.00022925415
501	Query Optimization for XML	1999	VLDB	0.00021530411
849	ORDPATHs: Insert-Friendly XML Node Labels	2004	SIGMOD	0.00015962987
1,027	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD	0.0001458865
1,149	A Comprehensive XQuery to SQL Translation using Dynamic Interval Encoding	2003	SIGMOD	0.0001365931
1,524	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR	0.00011516282
1,795	MonetDB/XQuery: A Fast XQuery Processor Powered by a Relational Engine	2006	SIGMOD	0.00010526672
1,815	Indexing XML Data Stored in a Relational Database	2004	VLDB	0.00010455025
2,329	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB	9.0210652e-05
4,117	Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps	2003	VLDB	6.4371566e-05
8,934	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD	4.427232e-05

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Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12,496	Locking-Aware Structural Join Operators for XML Query Processing	2006	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
6,963	Query Translation from XPath to SQL in the Presence of Recursive DTDs	2005	VLDB	4.8828629e-05
12,366	Grouping and Optimization of XPath Expressions in DB2 pureXML	2008	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
12,389	Towards a Physical XML independent XQuery/SQL/XML Engine	2008	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
13,698	An Injection with Tree Awareness: Adding Staircase Join to PostgreSQL	2004	VLDB	-
12,362	Relational-Style XML Query	2008	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
12,503	Efficient XSLT Processing in Relational Database System	2006	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
2,329	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB	9.0210652e-05
4,117	Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps	2003	VLDB	6.4371566e-05
12,441	XPath on Steroids: Exploiting Relational Engines for XPath Performance	2007	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05