Application-Tailored XML Storage

Several native approaches to storing large XML data sets exist. In all of these approaches the internal data representation is designed to support any ad-hoc XQuery query. This paper argues that XQuery and its data model are too universal and any one-size-fits-all XML representation leads to significant overheads in terms of representation size and complexity. Based on the consideration that in many applications queries/updates workload is known in advance and does not change often, the paper proposes an application-tailored XML storage. Elimination of the superfluous XQuery data model features and utilization of the various physical data representations improve performance on the specified workload, while ad-hoc queries support can be limited.