The XQuery Formal Semantics: A Foundation for Implementation and Optimization
Byron Koon Kau Choi, Mary Fernández · 2002
XQuery is a strongly typed, functional language, which supports the common processing, transformation, and querying tasks of a wide variety of XML applications. Following the tradition of other functional languages, XQuery includes a complete formal semantics. In this paper, we argue that basing an XQuery implementation on the XQuery Formal Semantics not only ensures correctness, but is a good foundation for optimization. We describe an architecture that we have implemented and that is based on the XQuery Formal Semantics and describe several logical and physical optimizations that can be easily integrated in the above architecture.