Pathfinder: XQuery—The Relational Way

Summary: Pathfinder compiles XQuery into relational operators in MonetDB, using tree encodings, staircase joins, loop lifting, and sequence encoding. With only local kernel extensions, it scales to processing XML inputs over 10 GB on commodity hardware. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 9471
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2005
Pagerank: 6.3348421e-05
Overall Rank: 5,170 | 64.54%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Peter Boncz (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica)
2. Torsten Grust (Technical University of Munich)
3. Maurice van Keulen (University of Twente)
4. Stefan Manegold (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica)
5. Jan Rittinger (University of Konstanz)
6. Jens Teubner (Technical University of Munich)

BibTeX Citation

@article{boncz_vldb05,
        title = {{Pathfinder: XQuery—The Relational Way}},
        author = {Boncz, Peter and Grust, Torsten and van Keulen, Maurice and Manegold, Stefan and Rittinger, Jan and Teubner, Jens},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '05},
        year = {2005}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,738	Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data	2014	SIGMOD	9.8823494e-05
3,673	Efficient Processing of Window Functions in Analytical SQL Queries	2015	VLDB	7.2113383e-05
7,607	XQuery Reloaded	2009	VLDB	5.5845947e-05
12,606	Implementing Filesystems by Tree-aware DBMSs	2008	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 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
893	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD	0.00013374715
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
13,899	An Injection with Tree Awareness: Adding Staircase Join to PostgreSQL	2004	VLDB	-

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,576	Efficient Evaluation of XQuery over Streaming Data	2005	VLDB
2	12,555	Relational-Style XML Query	2008	SIGMOD
3	3,727	Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps	2003	VLDB
4	7,486	Why Off-the-Shelf RDBMSs are Better at XPath Than You Might Expect	2007	SIGMOD
5	893	Accelerating XPath Location Steps	2002	SIGMOD
6	4,265	XQuery Implementation in a Relational Database System	2005	VLDB
7	12,635	XPath on Steroids: Exploiting Relational Engines for XPath Performance	2007	SIGMOD
8	2,720	XQuery on SQL Hosts	2004	VLDB
9	1,460	MonetDB/XQuery: A Fast XQuery Processor Powered by a Relational Engine	2006	SIGMOD
10	9,090	A SQL:1999 Code Generator for the Pathfinder XQuery Compiler	2007	SIGMOD