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: 3920
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 4.6860809e-05
Overall Rank: 7,639 | 46.91%
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
5,091	Join Query Optimization Techniques for Complex Event Processing Applications	2018	VLDB	5.7010894e-05
8,938	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD	4.4229886e-05
12,313	Cost Based Plan Selection for XPath	2009	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
12,421	Implementing Filesystems by Tree-aware DBMSs	2008	VLDB	4.1905499e-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
99	XMark: A Benchmark for XML Data Management	2002	VLDB	0.00050043993
153	Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities	1999	VLDB	0.00040759404
193	On Supporting Containment Queries in Relational Database Management Systems	2001	SIGMOD	0.00035591171
239	Holistic Twig Joins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching	2002	SIGMOD	0.00031581944
392	Indexing and Querying XML Data for Regular Path Expressions	2001	VLDB	0.00024546229
447	Storing and Querying Ordered XML Using a Relational Database System	2002	SIGMOD	0.00022927245
504	Query Optimization for XML	1999	VLDB	0.00021513261
843	ORDPATHs: Insert-Friendly XML Node Labels	2004	SIGMOD	0.00015975516
1,028	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD	0.00014578947
1,149	A Comprehensive XQuery to SQL Translation using Dynamic Interval Encoding	2003	SIGMOD	0.00013649094
1,524	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR	0.00011509464
1,787	MonetDB/XQuery: A Fast XQuery Processor Powered by a Relational Engine	2006	SIGMOD	0.00010543821
1,814	Indexing XML Data Stored in a Relational Database	2004	VLDB	0.00010450277
2,333	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB	9.0127497e-05
4,119	Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps	2003	VLDB	6.4309908e-05
8,938	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD	4.4229886e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12,505	Locking-Aware Structural Join Operators for XML Query Processing	2006	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
6,961	Query Translation from XPath to SQL in the Presence of Recursive DTDs	2005	VLDB	4.8781754e-05
12,374	Grouping and Optimization of XPath Expressions in DB2 pureXML	2008	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
12,398	Towards a Physical XML independent XQuery/SQL/XML Engine	2008	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
13,712	An Injection with Tree Awareness: Adding Staircase Join to PostgreSQL	2004	VLDB	-
12,370	Relational-Style XML Query	2008	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
12,512	Efficient XSLT Processing in Relational Database System	2006	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
2,333	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB	9.0127497e-05
4,119	Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps	2003	VLDB	6.4309908e-05
12,450	XPath on Steroids: Exploiting Relational Engines for XPath Performance	2007	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05