Extensible index technique for storing and retrieving XML documents

Because most researches that were studied so far on XML documents used a method to express coordinate-based methods in most of the index techniques, the update operation makes a large burden. Due to the expression of structural relations between elements, attributes and texts, we must reconstruct the structure of coordinate. As the reconstruction process proceeds in the index structure overall the XML document without limitation of the number of node in a cascade manner, it is caused a serious performance problem by the frequent update operations. In this paper, we propose an index technique based on an extensible index that does not cause serious performance degradations. It can limit the number of node to participate in reconstruction process and improve lots of performance capacities on the whole. Extensible index with deferred update shows additional performance improvement specially. In addition, the extensible index technique contains the advantage to perform efficiently the containment relationship query through the simple expression, therefore it can maximize the performance of the system.