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: 3981
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 5.6073128e-05
Overall Rank: 7,486 | 48.64%
DOI: 10.1145/1247480.1247591

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Torsten Grust (Technical University of Munich)
2. Jan Rittinger (Technical University of Munich)
3. Jens Teubner (Technical University of Munich)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{grust_sigmod07,
        title = {{Why Off-the-Shelf RDBMSs are Better at XPath Than You Might Expect}},
        author = {Grust, Torsten and Rittinger, Jan and Teubner, Jens},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '07},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1247480.1247591},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1247480.1247591},
        year = {2007}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,588	Join Query Optimization Techniques for Complex Event Processing Applications	2018	VLDB	6.6167545e-05
9,090	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD	5.3251649e-05
12,499	Cost Based Plan Selection for XPath	2009	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,606	Implementing Filesystems by Tree-aware DBMSs	2008	VLDB	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
79	XMark: A Benchmark for XML Data Management	2002	VLDB	0.00036555628
137	Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities	1999	VLDB	0.00029877792
163	On Supporting Containment Queries in Relational Database Management Systems	2001	SIGMOD	0.00027839792
175	Holistic Twig Joins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching	2002	SIGMOD	0.00027226333
341	Indexing and Querying XML Data for Regular Path Expressions	2001	VLDB	0.00020704572
362	Storing and Querying Ordered XML Using a Relational Database System	2002	SIGMOD	0.00020125068
470	Query Optimization for XML	1999	VLDB	0.00017965707
719	ORDPATHs: Insert-Friendly XML Node Labels	2004	SIGMOD	0.00014637695
893	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD	0.00013374715
1,204	A Comprehensive XQuery to SQL Translation using Dynamic Interval Encoding	2003	SIGMOD	0.00011664562
1,460	MonetDB/XQuery: A Fast XQuery Processor Powered by a Relational Engine	2006	SIGMOD	0.00010710674
1,508	Sorting And Indexing With Partitioned B-Trees	2003	CIDR	0.00010540965
2,031	Indexing XML Data Stored in a Relational Database	2004	VLDB	9.2839251e-05
2,720	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB	8.2086071e-05
3,727	Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps	2003	VLDB	7.1689738e-05
9,090	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD	5.3251649e-05

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