Efficient minimization of XML tree pattern queries

Efficient query optimization is critical to the performance of query processing in a database system. The same is true for XML databases and queries. XML queries naturally carry a tree-shaped search pattern which usually contains redundancies. Efficient minimization of the tree patterns of XML queries forms an integral and important part of XML query optimization. This short paper sketchily presents the algorithms we developed for XML tree pattern query minimization that outperform previous approaches.