Principles of Guarded Structural Indexing
François Picalausa, Fletcher, George, Jan Hidders, Stijn Vansummeren · TU/e Research Portal · 2014
We present a new structural characterization of the expres-sive power of the acyclic conjunctive queries in terms of guarded simulations, and give a finite preservation theorem for the guarded simulation invariant fragment of first order logic. We discuss the relevance of these results as a formal basis for constructing so-called guarded structural indexes. Struc-tural indexes were first proposed in the context of semi-structured query languages and later successfully applied as an XML indexation mechanism for XPath-like queries on trees and graphs. Guarded structural indexes provide a generalization of structural indexes from graph databases to relational databases.