Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps

Summary: Introduces staircase join, a DBMS join operator that encapsulates tree-aware reasoning for relational XML/XPath processing. Exploiting pre/post-order regions and subtree properties, it accelerates all XPath axes using simple integer predicates. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 9193
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2003
Pagerank: 7.1689738e-05
Overall Rank: 3,727 | 74.44%
DOI: 10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50053-7

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Torsten Grust (University of Konstanz)
2. Maurice van Keulen (University of Twente)
3. Jens Teubner (University of Konstanz)

BibTeX Citation

@article{grust_vldb03,
        title = {{Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps}},
        author = {Grust, Torsten and van Keulen, Maurice and Teubner, Jens},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '03},
        doi = {10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50053-7},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50053-7},
        year = {2003}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,460	MonetDB/XQuery: A Fast XQuery Processor Powered by a Relational Engine	2006	SIGMOD	0.00010710674
2,720	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB	8.2086071e-05
5,170	Pathfinder: XQuery—The Relational Way	2005	VLDB	6.3348421e-05
7,460	XQuery Optimization	2003	VLDB	5.6119031e-05
7,486	Why Off-the-Shelf RDBMSs are Better at XPath Than You Might Expect	2007	SIGMOD	5.6073128e-05
7,981	DeltaNI: An Efficient Labeling Scheme for Versioned Hierarchical Data	2013	SIGMOD	5.5146136e-05
9,576	Indexing Highly Dynamic Hierarchical Data	2015	VLDB	5.2528121e-05
10,630	Cephalopod - Virtual Data Model Composition through Partial Query Translation	2025	CIDR	5.093636e-05
12,057	Index-Assisted Hierarchical Computations in Main-Memory RDBMS	2016	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,476	XPath Whole Query Optimization	2010	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,499	Cost Based Plan Selection for XPath	2009	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,635	XPath on Steroids: Exploiting Relational Engines for XPath Performance	2007	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
13,899	An Injection with Tree Awareness: Adding Staircase Join to PostgreSQL	2004	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 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
163	On Supporting Containment Queries in Relational Database Management Systems	2001	SIGMOD	0.00027839792
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
771	Conjunctive Selection Conditions in Main Memory	2002	PODS	0.00014161995
893	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD	0.00013374715
1,139	Managing Intervals Efficiently in Object-Relational Databases	2000	VLDB	0.0001202217
1,523	Efficient Structural Joins on Indexed XML Documents	2002	VLDB	0.00010502089

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,265	XQuery Implementation in a Relational Database System	2005	VLDB
2	12,696	Efficient XSLT Processing in Relational Database System	2006	VLDB
3	1,523	Efficient Structural Joins on Indexed XML Documents	2002	VLDB
4	12,689	Locking-Aware Structural Join Operators for XML Query Processing	2006	SIGMOD
5	12,555	Relational-Style XML Query	2008	SIGMOD
6	893	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD
7	2,720	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB
8	12,635	XPath on Steroids: Exploiting Relational Engines for XPath Performance	2007	SIGMOD
9	7,486	Why Off-the-Shelf RDBMSs are Better at XPath Than You Might Expect	2007	SIGMOD
10	13,899	An Injection with Tree Awareness: Adding Staircase Join to PostgreSQL	2004	VLDB