A Query Pruning Technique for Optimizing Regular Path Expressions in Semistructured Databases
Chang-Won Park, Jin-Wan Jeong · 2002
Regular path expressions are primary elements for formulating queries over the semistructured data that does not assume the conventional schemas. In addition, the query pruning is an important optimization technique to avoid useless traversals in evaluating regular path expressions. However, the existing query pruning often fails to fully optimize multiple regular path expressions, and the previous methods that post-process the result of the existing query pruning must check exponential combinations of sub-results. In this paper, we present a new query pruning technique that consists of the preprocessing phase and the pruning phase. Our two-phase query pruning is affective in optimizing multiple regular path expressions, and is more scalable than the previous methods in that it never check the exponential combinations of sub-results.