Efficient Compression and Querying of XML Repositories

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing popularity of XML as a data format, there is a large demand for efficient techniques in storing and querying XML documents. However XML is by nature verbose, due to repeatedly used tags that describe data. For this reason the storage requirements of XML can be excessive and lead to increased costs for data manipulation. Therefore, it seems natural to use compression techniques to increase the efficiency of storing and querying XML data. In this paper, we propose a new approach called SCQX for Storing, Compressing and Querying XML documents. This approach compresses the structure of an XML document based on exploiting repetitive consecutive tags in the structure, and then SCQX stores the compressed XML structure and the data separately in a robust storage structure that includes a set of access support structures to guarantee fast query performance. Moreover, SCQX supports querying of the compressed XML structure directly and efficiently without requiring decompression. An experimental evaluation on sets of XML data shows the effectiveness of our approach.